Swallowing the Camel

The Prodigal Witch Part XV: Stephen Dollins

2011-12-09T14:29:00.000-08:00

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Stephen Dollins left Satanism for Christ in 1978, becoming a preacher and a crusader against the occult, but it wasn't until the late '90s that he gained prominence as a powerful enemy of Harry Potter and the Tooth Fairy.

The following comes from a talk Dollins gave to The Prophecy Club in 1998 or '99. I must say, his killer mullet-and-tie combo makes him one of the most striking PC speakers in recent memory.

Dollins was born in the late '50s to a policeman and a nurse, who for some reason put him up for adoption in his infancy. He was adopted by a Christian couple in Oklahoma. His father was a professor of psychiatry and head of education at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. This would probably be the late Dr. Joe Dollins.
Dollins believes there may been generational witchcraft in his family - he doesn't specify which one, the biological or adoptive - because as a child he could "make bad things happen to other kids", Carrie-style. As we have seen with many of the witches and occultists in this series (for instance, Johanna Michaelsen), some fundamentalist Christians believe that any form of occult practice can imbue a person with supernatural powers of a demonic nature, and that these powers can be passed on to descendants like a curse.

Dollins's troubles with the Devil began in 1969, with an innocent high school assignment on comparative religion. He decided to write his paper on the inefficacy of witchcraft. This led him to a young hippie couple, Kenny and Christie, who not only introduced him to a wide range of illicit substances, but gave him his entrée into Satanism. They said a group of their friends would tell him all about the powers of witchcraft if he attended one of their meetings, which were of course top-secret and invitation-only. "When they call, be ready to go," the hippies warned.
One month later, a coven priestess called Alexandria phoned Stephen just before midnight. He found some pretext to slip out of his house, and was conveyed to a private home in another neighbourhood (this was presumably in or near Alva, Oklahoma, where the university is located). The house had been converted into a ritual space. Nude women were singing around a circle-in-a-pentagram on the floor. The air was already charged with spirits by the time Stephen arrived, so he was instructed to sit in the centre of the circle for his own protection.
The witches obligingly answered all of his questions about hexes, spells, and charms. If they were weirded out by some strange kid doing his homework assignment during one of their rituals, no one said so. In fact, they took a liking to him because of his "inborn powers", and invited him to another meeting.

This second meeting was held in a ritzier neighbourhood, in a house decorated with an inverted cross and paintings of hell. Dollins was surprised to find that one of his old biology teachers was the high priest. He was even more surprised to learn that the Satanic witches wanted to recruit him. "We've been watching you very carefully," the biology teacher told him. They tried to entice him into joining their grotto, offering up buffets of coke, mescaline, heroin, and women on demand. But their talk of human sacrifice ultimately scared Stephen away.

In September 1970, Dr. Joe Dollins died. Stephen says he was struck by a hit-and-run driver while riding his bike.
This tragedy drove Stephen straight into the arms of Satan. He wanted nothing to do with a God that would allow his father to die such a cruel, untimely death. He renounced Christianity and filled out an application to join the Church of Satan, formed just three years earlier in California.

He somehow ended up in Clarksville, Texas (the one the Monkees didn't sing about). He established himself as a high priest in the Church of Satan there, summoning demons to do awful things to people who annoyed him.
He once tried to hex an elderly Christian women by summoning Astaroth. The demon appeared to him in the form of his worst childhood fear: The Wolfman peeking out of an orange cloud. And it was not happy. "Don't you ever send me after a Christian again!", Astaroth-Wolfman bellowed.

This sort of incident is repeated again and again by former witches; their demonic powers prove worthless against Christians, before whom even the most powerful minions of hell quiver. You can send demons against anyone, even heads of state, but woe betide you if you send a demon to a pepperpot with a Bible.

These incidents also indicate that demons are not unionized and have to make their own labour complaints.

Picture not related

Dollins seems a bit confused about which Satanic organization he joined. At first he calls it the Church of Satan, but later in his talk he identifies it as the Brotherhood, the same nationwide cult to which Mike Warnke supposedly belonged in the mid-'60s. The "denomination" he describes is certainly not the Church of Satan. He mentions that his former co-religionists believe Satan will triumph at Armageddon, and Church of Satan members believe in neither Armageddon nor a literal Satan.
Dollins doesn't give the size of his Satanic network (perhaps he learned a lesson from the Warnke affair), but he does hint at a massive Satanic conspiracy of the sort John Todd described. He claims the police and sheriff's departments of a certain town in Texas were in the pockets of local Satanists, and tells us that one Brotherhood member of his acquaintance took part in animal sacrifice and child abduction (he doesn't tell us if he reported this guy to the proper authorities or not, but given later events and Mike Warnke's example, we can safely assume he did not).

In Topeka, Kansas, Stephen wed his high priestess. This is where the powers of Hell abandoned him (apparently, even Satan doesn't like Kansas). He ended up broke and suicidally depressed. Then he remembered reading Mike Warnke's memoir, The Satan Seller. The book had been given to him by the same Brotherhood member who sacrificed animals, after he was saved by a Christian ministry called Crisis Answers.
Thanks to Warnke's book and his child-kidnapping buddy, Dollins realized he could leave the Brotherhood.
Remember, this talk was given in the late '90s, six or seven years after Warnke's lies were exposed by Cornerstone magazine. Tying his story to Warnke's was a serious tactical mistake on Dollins's part. More than anything else, this indicates that his story is 100% fictional. Sure, maybe he met some hippies in Oklahoma who smoked hash and dabbled in witchcraft, but he didn't become a high priest of the Brotherhood. There is no Brotherhood. It was Warnke's invention.

Anyway, Dollins phoned up his animal-sacrificing friend and learned, to his amazement, that a group of Christians had been praying for his salvation for the past seven years. The friend arranged for him to meet with two pastors who love-bombed the hell out of him, literally. He was saved on Groundhog Day, 1978.
This part of the story jives perfectly with the other remarkable conversions we've seen in this series. No former witch or reformed Satanist is content to say, "I worshiped the Devil for x number of years, then I got bored with it and became a Christian."

Though Mike Warnke faced the threat of assassination after leaving the Brotherhood, Dollins mentions no retaliatory measures. That's to his credit. In the stories of John Todd, Doc Marquis, "Elaine" (Edna Moses), and Warnke, it's very hard to believe that an enormous cult with the powers of Hell at its beck and call can't manage to bump off a few unarmed guys who regularly appear in public without so much as a single bodyguard. It makes for some compelling Christian testimony, but in the realism department it gets a big, fat zero.

Dollins has dedicated his Christian life to warning against the hazards of the occult. Now you would think by "occult", I mean summoning Wolfman demons and putting curses on old women and whatnot, right? Well, Dollins doesn't get quite that far. Just like the anti-occult crusaders and former witches of the '70s and '80s, he decided that the best way to keep kids out of Satanism is to make sure they aren't exposed to any occult influences at a tender age. Don't let your kids read the Harry Potter books. Don't hang dreamcatchers over babies' cribs; Native spirituality is not Christian, therefore it is demon-inspired. Don't tell your child about the Tooth Fairy.

Wait, what? The Tooth Fairy?

Yes, the Tooth Fairy. Dollins asks his audience, in all seriousness, "How many know fairies are demons?", then tells us, "When you talk to your child about the Tooth Fairy, you're actually telling them about a demon." *

I thought we were giving kids a convenient explanation for why we take their teeth and replace them with small amounts of money.

Dollins also warns against Pokemon (because it encourages children to become "masters", seems to involve cute little demons with occult powers, and may cause seizures), Sarah Coventry jewelry ("occult" designs), and role-playing games. "The more you get into the fantasy world, the more it seems real, and all of a sudden now you don't know what's real and what's not," he says without the faintest trace of irony.

Dollins actually wrote an entire book about the dangers of Harry Potter, Under the Spell of Harry Potter (Global Distributing Services, 2002). It's not the only one, of course, but it does seem to contain the least amount of integrity. In the intro, Dollins quotes two young Harry Potter fans as "anonymous sources", implying that these were children he personally interviewed. In reality, the quotes came directly from two San Francisco Chronicle articles, as pointed out by the pro-Potter website Dollins Debunked.

To sum it all up, there isn't much to say about Mr. Dollins. He wasn't even creative enough to come up with his own Satanic cult mythos; he just recycled discredited stuff from the '70s, threw in some weirdness about demonic fairies, and jumped on the anti-Harry Potter bandwagon with numerous other fundamentalists. He followed a script, laid down by Doreen Irvine in the early '70s, that is now extremely familiar:

- A Dickensian childhood full of abuse, exploitation, and deprivation (Dollins skipped this step, as his adoptive parents were perfectly nice Christians).
- An early introduction to Jesus that would pave the way for salvation later in life
- An absence of time markers (the only two dates Dollins provides are the year of his introduction to devil worship and the date of his conversion to Christianity)
- Lack of detail about the beliefs of Satanists (scripture, philosophy, etc.), but extraneous detail about the practices of Satanists (sacrifice, crime, etc.). Dollins mentions absolutely no scripture at all, not even the fictional tome called The Great Mother that Warnke's Brotherhood used.
- Helplessness. Rather than being led into Satanic evil through his/her bad choices, the protagonist is usually a naive and vulnerable innocent victimized, lured, or coerced into sin by more worldly people. Once ensnared, escape is impossible. Teenage Dollins was heavily dosed with drugs before being enticed into Satanism. He was just a nice, normal kid trying to finish a school assignment.
- Supernatural events and paranormal abilities are common. Demons and angels materialize, Satanists use death curses against their enemies, and sometimes Satan himself makes an appearance. Dollins caught the attention of Satanists because he possessed inherited supernatural powers, and later trained himself to physically summon demons.
- A remarkable conversion experience
- Complete redemption and forgiveness through Christ
- Expert advice on the occult. After sharing his/her testimony, the ex-witch or former Satanist gives us pointers on how to avoid occultism, prevent children from becoming involved in it, and/or how to expunge it from our communities. There are typically warnings about Ouija boards, Halloween, and occult literature. Or in Dollins's case, fictional boy wizards and the freaking Tooth Fairy.

* Please note that Dollins did not mention telling your kids about Tom Noonan. So feel free to do that.

A Note to Readers

2011-12-08T13:43:00.001-08:00

Because several posts in the Prodigal Witch series touched on child abuse issues, I have been receiving many emails and comments informing me that So-and-So in Such-and-Such County is a pedophile and is actively molesting and/or abducting children.

I cannot possibly stress strongly enough that this is not the place to air such complaints. If you are aware of child abuse, human trafficking, or any other form of child exploitation being committed by a certain person or group of persons, report this to the proper authorities immediately.

Comments that contain unsubstantiated allegations against specific persons will be removed.

Wednesday Weirdness Roundup: Maybe some people should stick with kitten calendars

2011-11-09T13:38:00.000-08:00

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According to Swedish toxicologist Carl Johan Calleman, the Mayan Long Count calendar ended on October 28, 2011. This date was based on his own calculations, and doesn't seem to have been accepted by any other Mayanists; they're sticking with the December 21, 2012 end date. Calleman tells us the end of the calendar has resulted in a profound shift in consciousness for a number of people, several of whom now experience a "flattening of time, an end to time acceleration." I have no idea what that's all about, but if it means they don't have to adhere to Daylight Savings, then it's pretty damned cool.
Anyway, this is some very bad news if you've been following the story of attorney/UFO disclosure activist Peter Gersten. He plans to pitch himself off the top of Bell Rock in Sedona, Arizona, on December 21, 2012 at 11:11 UT (4:11 AM in Arizona), in the hope an interdimensional portal will open up and catch him before he hits the ground. Gersten fondly calls this plan his "leap of faith". Other people call it "OMG WHY". Gersten explains it all in this 2007 interview with ufologist/filmmaker Paul Kimball, who stays a little too calm throughout. (Kimball, on his blog, opines that the leap of faith is "perfectly logical...within the context of Gerston's stated beliefs", and that if Gerston jumps, he will "applaud him for having the courage of his convictions." Whatta pal.)

I doubt that anyone will be able to talk Mr. Gersten out of this, but I'm calling upon anyone who knows him or can get in touch with him to at least try. Failing that, perhaps we can prevail upon the women of Arizona to start knitting the world's largest net.

Wednesday Weirdness Roundup

2011-11-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

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Leah Haley was by far one of the most interesting alien abductees on the scene today. She has a couple of firsts to her credit: She was the first to write a children's book designed to help kids view their alien abductions as positive, edifying experiences, and she was the first to claim she was inside an alien spacecraft when it was shot down by the U.S. military. Now, however, Haley believes that every last one of her "alien" encounters was actually a military abduction, or MILAB. In March, she told UFO blogger Jack Brewer that none of it was real; it was all a cover for government mind control experimentation. Farewell, Ceto.
In related news, Charles Hickson passed away on September 9. Hickson was involved in one of the strangest UFO encounters ever reported, the Pascagoula incident of 1973. He and his 19-year-old fishing buddy, Calvin Parker, were supposedly levitated into a spaceship and examined by eyeless, carrot-nosed aliens.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his government leaders are proof positive that once you deny the Holocaust (or any major, well-documented historical event, for that matter), you no longer have to live in reality. In June, he declared that Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to stoning for adultery in 2006, wasn't really given a death sentence - that was all a media hoax. An Iranian official had already tried to stifle the worldwide outcry against Ashtiani's sentence by stating, in contradiction to all previous statements, that Ashtiani was also convicted of murdering her husband (she was actually acquitted). And Youcef Nedarkhani, the Christian minister sentenced to death for blasphemy against Islam? He's really on trial for rape and extortion, even though the court documents only mention blasphemy.
"Face discovered in testicular tumour". Stay classy, Telegraph.
Who is the artist known as the Philadelphia Wireman? His or her enigmatic metal sculptures were salvaged from the trash in the early '80s, and since that time there have been murmurs that they're a hoax perpetrated by John Ollman of the Fleischer/Ollman Gallery. The Wireman's pieces are currently on display there.

What's the Deal with Troy Davis?

2011-09-26T17:28:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the case of Troy Davis, the Georgia man convicted of killing off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in 1989. Davis received a death sentence, which was carried out late on the night of September 21, after the Supreme Court denied a stay of execution. Many are convinced of his guilt or innocence, but those unfamiliar with the case find themselves trying to gain any footing in a propaganda slipstream, inundated from all sides by conflicting accounts and contradictory "facts". Ann Coulter tells us there were "dozens of witnesses" to the shooting of MacPhail (as shown below, there were about a dozen eyewitnesses), and that "Several eyewitnesses, both acquaintances and strangers, specifically identified Davis as the one who shot Officer MacPhail" (only one eyewitness was acquainted with the suspects, and he named Sylvester Coles as the killer). Ed Pilkington of The Guardian informs us the jury was "shown no physical evidence" against Troy Davis (though most of the physical evidence can't be tied to Davis, it was presented at trial).
Unfortunately, even many of the news reports, blogs and websites that attempted to stay neutral in reporting this event have left us with a jumble of mixed information: Some accurate, some questionable, some flat-out wrong. And documents that could make the picture much clearer, such as the trial transcript, are not readily available (to date, I have not even been able to ascertain some basic details, like Davis's exact height/weight at the time of the murder).
Just what are the facts in the Davis case? Was he, as he and his supporters contended, a falsely convicted man? Did most of the key witnesses at Davis's 1991 trial (7 out of 9 is the number most commonly given) really recant their testimony? Has the ballistics evidence presented at his trial since been discredited? Did Troy Davis deserve a new trial?

You may not be able to decide, after reading this post, if Troy Davis was truly guilty or not. But you should be able to reach three conclusions about the case:

1. There were only two viable suspects in the murder of Mark MacPhail. One of them was treated like a suspect, and the other was treated like a witness.
2. Physical evidence in the case does not point unequivocally to either suspect.
3. If Troy Davis had been granted a new trial, it is highly unlikely the state could have obtained a conviction.

Troy Davis

In 1989, Troy Davis was 20, unemployed, and living in his mother's brick house on Sylvester Drive in the Cloverdale section of Savannah. Cloverdale is almost universally described in news stories of the time as a "mostly black, middle-class" area of the city, a tidy and quiet neighbourhood. But Davis hung out in rougher areas, and like some of his friends was known to carry a gun. In July 1988, he pled guilty to carrying a concealed weapon (a charge of possession of a gun with altered serial numbers was dropped). Outside his neighbourhood, he tried to project a tough image. Coworkers at National Electric Gate, where he worked for brief spurts in '88 and early '89, nicknamed him "Rough as Hell".
One Savannah Evening Press story from August '89, citing an unknown source, claimed Davis was involved in a high-speed police chase just two months before the murder of Mark MacPhail.

Nothing else in Davis's background hints at a violent nature. On the contrary, neighbours noted that he was the "man in the family", helping Virginia Davis care for his three younger siblings after his dad left and his older sister Tina joined the Army. When his sister Kimberly became confined to a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis, he quit high school to drive her to and from therapy and doctor appointments, and earned a GED at the same time.
According to Tina, Troy took exquisite care of Kimberly: He catheterized her, bathed her and did her hair, even encouraged her to walk by hanging on to her wheelchair.
He also became a big brother to kids in the neighborhood, fixing their bikes and setting up a basketball hoop for them.
He was neither bright nor ambitious (one teacher called him a "dumb kid and a worse student"). He rarely showed up for his shifts at National Electric Gate. His boss said he was a good worker when he did bother to show up, though, and Davis struck him as a kid who "wanted to stay out of trouble and get somewhere." He was reportedly planning to join the Marines at the time of Mark MacPhail's murder.

The Crimes: August 18 - 19, 1989

August 18, 1989 was a Friday. That night, Troy Davis put on a white T-shirt with a Batman logo on it, dark shorts, and a baseball cap. He began walking to a pool party on Cloverdale Drive, hosted by another teenager named Tonya Johnson, and was picked up on the way there by Eric Ellison and his 16-year-old friend, Darrell "D.D." Collins. (1, 20)

Sometime before 11:30, as Davis and Darrell Collins were leaving the party, Davis and a few other young men began exchanging insults with a carload of guys on Cloverdale Drive. Early reports stated there were three people in the car, but there were actually five: Mark Wilds (the driver), Joseph Blige, Benjamin Gordon, Lamar Brown, and Michael Cooper. (1, 16)
Just before 11:30 (a 911 call was made at 11:29), someone fired a handgun into the vehicle, shattering the back window. Michael Cooper, 20, was struck by a bullet that lodged in his jaw. (1, 3)
Wilds took him to Candler General Hospital. Questioned there by police, Cooper said he didn't recognize the person who shot him, a black man in a white Batman T-shirt, black hat, and shorts. (1,3)
Cooper was treated and released.

Sylvester "Redd" Coles, a 20-year-old friend of Troy Davis, was also at the pool party, according to the trial testimony of Tonya Johnson. This contradicts the assertion (made by the Atlanta Conservative Examiner and others) that no one has alleged Sylvester Coles was present at the party. (2, 24)
Coles told police, and later testified on cross-examination, that he was in possession of a .38 pistol on the night of the shootings. At first he claimed he had given it to Jeffrey Sapp while he was playing pool. (1, 26) Later he said he gave it to another Jeffrey, Jeffrey Sams (which Sams denied). (1, 50) Darrell Collins testified at trial that Coles placed the gun on the front seat of Ellison's vehicle while they were at the pool hall, and he (Collins) hid it in some shrubbery. Whomever supposedly took care of this gun for Coles, the weapon was never found.
Sapp would be one of the witnesses against Davis (see "The Confession Witnesses", below). (1, 26)
Throughout the night, Coles was allegedly wearing a yellow T-shirt with a record store logo on it. This has led some people to break the case down to a "white shirt vs. yellow shirt" affair. Tonya Johnson (see "The Shooting of Michael Cooper", below) appears to be the only trial witness who testified that Coles was wearing a white shirt that night.
The yellow shirt wasn't introduced as evidence.

There was another shooting in Cloverdale about an hour later. Sherman Coleman, 17, was shot in the leg from a passing vehicle in front of a house on Wilder Drive. It is believed this vehicle contained Mark Wilds, Joseph Blige, Benjamin Gordon, and Lamar Brown.

By this time, Troy Davis, Darrell Collins, and Sylvester Coles were at a pool hall called Charlie Brown's on Oglethorpe Avenue. Davis and Collins had been driven there by Eric Ellison shortly after the Cooper shooting (Davis had been leaving the area on foot when Ellison once again picked him up in his vehicle).
They were now in a distinctly seedy part of town known as Yamacraw. As one of Davis's lawyers, Jason Ewart, would later comment, "Yamacraw was the Wild West back then — everyone had a gun."
Sometime before 1:00 AM, Red Coles noticed a homeless man (Larry Young) walking from the nearby convenience store with a container of beer, and decided to harass him. He, Davis and Collins followed Young to the parking lot of the Burger King attached to a bus station, on the corner of Oglethorpe Avenue and Fahm Street. You can view the scene on Google maps; the parking lot, the bus station with adjoining restaurant, and the Thunderbird Inn across the street are still in place.
Coles demanded some of Young's beer, Young refused, and the altercation turned violent. Coles warned Young, "You don't know me, I'll shoot you." Either Davis or Coles struck the homeless man on the back of the head with a pistol, hard enough to make him bleed (Coles said it was Davis, Davis said it was Coles, and Darell Collins testified at trial that it was Davis, but recanted that portion of his testimony later). Young, clutching his bleeding head, staggered over to a van full of military officers that was parked in the Burger King drive-through and asked for the driver's help. The driver ignored him. So did the Burger King employee working at the drive-through window. Young made his way to the men's room of the bus station. (1, 5)

It was at this point, around 1:00 AM, that the Burger King security guard intervened. Mark MacPhail, 27, was an off-duty police officer. A father of two, he had served six years as an Army Ranger before becoming a patrolman.
He was armed with a nightstick and a pistol for his job as a security guard. No evidence suggests that he drew his gun at any time during the altercation (it was still snapped into its holster when his body was found), but witnesses indicate he was brandishing his nightstick when he approached the men in the parking lot.

Larry Young and Darrell Collins left the scene in opposite directions as MacPhail approached, Young heading to the drive-through, and Collins fleeing across the street in the direction of a bank. Both claim they did not witness the shooting. Collins returned to the pool hall and caught a ride with Eric Ellison, who was just leaving. (1, 21)

MacPhail was shot twice, from the front. One bullet entered the left side of his face and exited the back of his neck. The other passed through the left armhole of his bulletproof vest, entering his chest. It pierced a lung and the aorta, lodging between the third and fourth vertebrae. Blood loss from the chest wound was fatal. It's possible that a third bullet grazed his leg.

Davis and Coles admittedly fled the scene. At 1:09, a Thunderbird Inn employee called 911 to report that someone had been shot. (1, 3) At 1:16, she called back to report that she had watched two black men fleeing the scene. She couldn't give a description of either man, though she observed that both were wearing shorts, one wore a T-shirt, and the other was in a tank top. (1, 4)

Minutes later, Savannah police officer David Owens found Mark MacPhail lying facedown in the parking lot.

The Eyewitnesses

At least 12 people witnessed these events, including the vanful of soldiers, but I include in this list only those eyewitnesses who testified at Troy Davis's 1991 murder trial. We'll deal with the witnesses who didn't testify later.

Troy Davis himself is excluded from the eyewitness list. It should be noted, though, that he did not implicate Sylvester Coles. Rather, he claimed he didn't see the shooting of MacPhail.

I exclude Larry Young and D.D. Collins as eyewitnesses (even though they implicated Davis in their testimony) because they also claimed they did not witness the shooting of MacPhail.

Larry Young, who was intoxicated at the time of his assault, gave a statement to police at 3:10 AM. According to this statement, the young man hassling him for beer wore a yellow tank top and "jam pants". He was about 5'9", 158 lbs, 20 or 21 years old. This person was joined by two more young men, and it was one of these two (either Davis or Collins) who struck him on the head from behind. Young said the assailant was wearing a white shirt with "some kind of print on it" and a white hat. He was 21-24 years old, 178 lbs., 5'11". (1, 8)
At trial, Young testified that the man with whom he was arguing was definitely wearing a yellow shirt, and this was not the same individual who struck him on the head. He wasn't precisely sure who hit him; he just knew it wasn't the man in the yellow shirt, because that man was still standing in front of him when he was hit. (1, 43)
After MacPhail came to his rescue, Young went to the drive-through window. His back was turned when the first shot was fired. He entered the bus depot and went to the washroom to clean up before the second shot was fired. At trial, he implicated Davis by testifying that his assailant wore a white shirt.
As Detective Ramsey testified at the 2010 evidentiary hearing (see "The Appeals" section, below), Young was shown a photo array that included Davis (but not Coles) and asked to identify the man with whom he argued on the night of his assault. Young selected Davis. However, a short time later, Ramsey and Young saw Sylvester Coles in the waiting area of the police station. Young immediately recognized him as the person who argued with him. (1, 43)
In a 2002 affidavit, Young stated he was drunk that night and the attack was a blur. He didn't know who assaulted him or what anyone was wearing.

Darrell Collins testified that he left the scene before Mark MacPhail arrived, and did not witness the shooting. (His testimony is particularly complicated, so we'll deal with it in the "Shooting of Michael Cooper" section below.)

This leaves seven eyewitnesses. Four of them have retracted their trial testimony.

1. Sylvester Coles

Sylvester "Red" Coles is the only other viable suspect in the death of Mark MacPhail. As previously noted, the .38 pistol he admittedly possessed on the night of the shooting has never been found. Why was Coles not a strong suspect? Because, as explained in the "What Happened After the Murder" section below, he was the first to go to the police and finger the other guy, Troy Davis.

What he said at trial: Coles claimed he arrived at Charlie Brown's pool hall around 8:00 PM and did not attend the Cloverdale party where Michael Cooper was shot. (1, 50) At some point that night, he gave his pistol to Jeffrey Sams for safekeeping. He admitted that he was the one who verbally threatened Larry Young, but said it was Davis who pistol-whipped Young and shot MacPhail. He stated the gun Davis used was short-barreled, with a brown handle (his own .38, he had told police, was chrome with a long barrel). (1, 28)
He has not retracted his testimony.

2. Joseph Washington

Joseph Washington, like Darrell Collins, was 16 years old at the time of the murder. He was the only eyewitness who actually knew Davis and Coles.

What he said at trial: He followed Davis, Collins, and Coles from the pool party to Frahm Street. For some reason, he ended up standing in a warehouse parking lot across the street from the Burger King, watching events unfold. (3, 19) He unequivocally stated that Sylvester Coles shot the security guard, but Washington only witnessed the first shot. He fled the warehouse parking lot before the second shot was fired. (3, 15)
What he stated in an affidavit: Washington has not retracted his testimony, but he did try to add to it. In 1996, he signed an affidavit stating that no one had ever asked him to describe what Coles was wearing when he shot Mark MacPhail. According to Washington, Coles was the one wearing a white Batman T-shirt.

3. Dorothy Ferrell

Dorothy Ferrell was a guest at the Thunderbird Inn, located across the street from the bus depot. She watched the shooting from the outside the motel. In a statement taken at 4:14 AM, she described watching the gunman shoot at a "police officer" (MacPhail) four times. The gunman wore a white T-shirt with writing on it, a white hat, and dark shorts. She was certain she had seen the same officer chasing the same young man off the property earlier in the day, during the afternoon, but later decided this must have been a different kid (it must have been a different guard, as well, because MacPhail was only on the overnight shift). (1, 10)
She picked Davis out of a photo lineup and identified him as the shooter three weeks after the murder, but admitted she had seen Davis on TV. (1, 29)

What she said at trial: At around 1:00 AM, as she descended a flight of stairs at the motel, she heard screaming from the Burger King parking lot. She ran to the sidewalk to see what was happening. One man (Young) was injured, and three men were standing in the Burger King parking lot. One of them (Collins) ran away, toward the Trust Company Bank. A "police officer" entered the parking lot. As he approached the two men, the one who was wearing a yellow T-shirt moved backwards, away from the officer. The third man, wearing a white T-shirt and dark shorts, then shot the officer. After the officer fell to the ground, the gunman stepped forward, stood over him, and fired again three times.
She believed the gunman was in his twenties, about 6' tall. She never saw his face straight-on, but did get profile views of it. (1, 56-59)
What she stated in an affidavit: In a 2002 affidavit, Ferrell stated, "I told the detective that Troy Davis was the shooter, even though the truth was that I didn’t see who shot the officer.” (5, 30)

4. Antoine Williams

Antoine Williams, a Burger King employee, was sitting in his car in the parking during the shooting. Williams had just entered the parking lot when, according to a police statement taken at 3:22 AM, he saw three men following Larry Young. He heard the four men arguing. One of the men "slapped" the back of Young's head with a gun. When MacPhail arrived, two of the men fled and a third - the man with the gun - remained behind, frantically trying to tuck the gun into his pants. This person shot the security guard four times. He described him as a black male, early twenties, tall (6' 2'' to 6'4"), about 180 lbs. The revolver was rusty. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that was either blue or white. (1, 8-10)
He picked Davis out of a photo lineup after seeing his face on a wanted poster, saying he was 60% certain he was the gunman. (1, 27)
Williams later admitted he was illiterate and did not read the police statement he signed, and has retracted his trial testimony. (5, 32)

What he said at trial: He said the shooter wore a white or yellow T-shirt and was not wearing a hat. (1, 52-53) Williams pointed out Davis in the courtroom as the shooter.
What he stated in an affidavit: He stated he did not know who shot MacPhail and did not see anything because his car was facing in the opposite direction and the windows were too tinted. Of his courtroom identification of Davis as the shooter, he stated, "I felt pressured to point at him because he was the one who was sitting in the courtroom. I have no idea what the person who shot the officer looks like." (5, 32) In other words, he is now 0% certain he can identify the gunman.

5. Harriet Murray

Larry Young's girlfriend, Harriet Murray, was waiting for Larry in the Burger King parking lot with two men who remain unidentified. She told detective Dean Fagerstrom, in a statement given at 2:27 AM, that the shooter was a black male between 24 and 30 years of age, wearing a white shirt. He had a narrow face with high cheekbones and a "fade away" haircut. She also gave an approximate weight and height (130 lbs and "four inches taller than the officer"). (1, 4-6) On August 24, 1991, she supposedly picked Davis out a photo lineup, identifying Coles as the person who harrassed Larry Young, and Davis as the one who assaulted Young and shot MacPhail. (1, 25). However, it came out at the 2010 evidentiary hearing that this was not the case. According to detective Gregory Ramsey, the lead investigator on the MacPhail case, Murray told him on August 24 that she could not "put a face" to any of the young men in the parking lot. (7, 29-30)
Murray died in 2006.

What she said at trial: She described the man in the yellow shirt harassing and threatening Larry Young. She testified that the shooter wore a white shirt, implicating Troy Davis. (1, 35)
What she stated in an affidavit: In 2002 she signed an affidavit recanting her trial testimony, reaffirming her initial statements that the shooter was the same person who verbally threatened Young - Sylvester Coles. (5, 18) This affidavit was not notarized, however, so it remains valueless as evidence. (3, 7)

6. Steven Sanders

Stephen Sanders, a USAF officer, was in the Burger King drive-through lane with seven other military officers who were attending a training exercise in Savannah, seated in the front passenger's seat of the van. He told police he could recall only one detail of the gunman's appearance: He was wearing a white shirt. He admitted he would not be able to recognize anyone at the scene except by their clothing. (1, 15) Needless to say, he could not pick Davis's picture out of a photo lineup.

What he said at trial: Though Sanders was unable to pick Troy Davis out of a photo lineup, he somehow was able to recognize Davis in the courtroom. Hmm. (1, 54)
At this time, he has made no statements regarding his trial testimony.

7. Robert Grizzard

Robert Grizzard, a USAF sergeant, was in the same vehicle with Sanders. Like Sanders, he told police he was unable to identify the shooter by his face or build. In fact, all he could say was that the gunman wore a hat. (1, 16)

What he said at trial: The shooter was a black male wearing a "light-colored shirt", and that's all he could say about him. Yet he pointed out Davis as that person. (1, 56)
What he said in an affidavit: In a 2003 affidavit, Grizzard re-stated that he could not identify the shooter. "The truth is that I don’t recall now and I didn’t recall then what the shooter was wearing, as I said in my initial statement." (5, 32-33)

What Happened After the Murder

The actions of Troy Davis and Sylvester Coles in the aftermath of the murder determined which one of them would become the prime suspect.

Both fled the scene. Coles went to the nearby home of his sister, Valerie Gordon, at 634 Yamacraw and changed his shirt. Coles and his sister later told police a rather bizarre story: Troy Davis showed up at his Gordon's house about half an hour after the murder, shirtless, and asked Coles if he could wear Coles's yellow T-shirt. Unless there was blood on Davis's shirt, this doesn't make a great deal of sense. If Davis did shoot Michael Cooper earlier in the night and feared that his white shirt would tie him to both shootings, why would he swap shirts with the other suspect in one of those shootings? That wouldn't make him any safer on his walk home, would it? At any rate, Davis changed his mind about the shirt. He took it off and left it in the Gordon house, according to Valerie. It was not seized as evidence.

Both young men had some time to think about what they would tell the police. Not that the police were looking for them. They had no suspects.

Coles did the smart thing. He lawyered up, went to the police on the night of August 19, and accused Davis of being the killer. He admitted only to harassing and verbally threatening Larry Young; it was Troy, he said, who bashed Young on the head with his gun and shot MacPhail.

Davis did the stupidest thing possible. On the evening of August 19, he had his sister drive him to Atlanta. His family claimed this was for his own safety, as area drug dealers had reportedly become very annoyed about the police presence in his neighborhood, but of course it's true, too, that Troy Davis simply didn't want to talk to the police. If he talked to them, he faced three grim choices: Confess to murder, accuse his friend Coles of murder, or clam up and hope for the best.

The Davis family pastor persuaded Troy to return to Savannah on August 23 and turn himself in to the police. As we know, he basically clammed up, insisting he didn't see the shooting. He saw Coles bash Larry Young on the head, and nothing more.
His murder trial began almost exactly two years later, in August 1991.

The state's case was that Davis shot Michael Cooper, fled the scene, and later shot Mark MacPhail because he thought MacPhail was going to arrest him for shooting Cooper.

The Confession Witnesses

Amnesty International and many other sources state that 7 of the 9 key witnesses against Troy Davis have recanted, without specifying who these key witnesses are.
They are the six eyewitnesses who testified for the prosecution (Joseph Washington testified for the defense), Larry Young, Darrell Collins, and three men who testified that Troy Davis confessed to them. It must be noted that one of these three "confession" witnesses did not testify at the murder trial, only at Davis's pre-trial hearing.
These three witnesses were:

1. Kevin McQueen, a jailhouse snitch who testified that Davis admitted shooting Cooper and MacPhail while the two were detained together. (7, 16-17) In 1996, he stated in an affidavit, "The truth is that Troy never confessed to me or talked to me about the shooting of the police officer. I made up the confession from information I had heard on T.V. and from other inmates about the crimes." (5, 27)
2. Jeffrey Sapp, a friend of Davis and Coles, testified that Davis confessed to him the afternoon after the murder, while riding his bicycle. In an affidavit he stated of the police, “I got tired of them harassing me, and they made it clear that the only way they would leave me alone is if I told them what they wanted to hear. I told them that Troy told me he did it, but it wasn’t true." (5, 28-29)

Monty Holmes, a friend of Davis, told police that around noon on August 19, 1991, Davis visited his home on a bicycle and confessed to shooting Mark MacPhail. (1, 40-41)
Though he was not called as a trial witness, he retracted his police statement and his hearing testimony in a 2003 affidavit, in which he stated, “I told them I didn’t know anything about who shot the officer, but they kept questioning me. I was real young at that time and here they were questioning me about the murder of a police officer like I was in trouble or something. I was scared… [I]t seemed like they wouldn’t stop questioning me until I told them what they wanted to hear. So I did. I signed a statement saying that Troy told me that he shot the cop.” (5, 28)

No one else claims that Davis confessed directly to them.
Nine people now claim that Sylvester Coles confessed to them (see "People Who Came Foward Long After the Fact to Implicate Red Coles", below).

Other Prosecution Witnesses

Those who are convinced of Davis's guilt, like Ann Coulter, have tried to downplay the recantations by pointing out that the prosecution called 34 witnesses, not just 9.
Those convinced of Davis's innocence, on the other hand, have exaggerated the number of recantations. For instance, Amnesty International claims that "all but two of the state's non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted or contradicted their testimony."
These are absurd statements, because (as in most trials) many of the witnesses were put on the stand to establish facts of the case, not to present evidence of the defendant's guilt or innocence. The first officer on the scene was called to testify about finding MacPhail's body to establish that he was fatally injured in the parking lot, the medical examiner was questioned about MacPhail's autopsy to establish cause of death, etc. These people have not recanted their testimony.
It's not the number of trial witnesses, but the quantity and quality of the evidence, that points to innocence or guilt.

The Shooting of Michael Cooper

At Davis's murder trial, the prosecution contended that Troy was the only viable suspect in this case, because the ballistics evidence (see below) indicated that Michael Cooper and Mark MacPhail were shot with the same gun. And Sylvester Coles, they argued, wasn't even at the Cloverdale party that evening. Tonya Davis testified for the defense that Coles was at her party, and in 2007 she signed an affidavit stating that she witnessed Coles hiding two weapons just after MacPhail was gunned down (see "Witnesses Who Came Forward Long After the Fact to Implicate Sylvester Coles").

Darrell Collins should have been a key prosecution witness, since he was the only person who identified Troy Davis as the pool party gunman. He told police he watched Davis shoot at Wilds's car with a short-barreled gun with a brown handle. (1, 20)
Collins also placed a gun in the hand of Sylvester Coles, however. In his second statement to police, he claimed that when Eric Ellison parked his vehicle near the pool hall, Sylvester Coles took a gun from his pants and placed it on the seat. Collins himself concealed the weapon in some bushes near the pool hall. (1, 26)
Collins didn't behave quite as expected on the stand. He retracted his police statement, declaring that the police had pressured him into naming Davis by threatening to charge him as an accessory to murder. He hadn't actually seen the shooter. He now claimed he hadn't even seen Troy Davis with a weapon that night at all. (1, 60)

Jeffrey Sams, who was also in Ellison's vehicle with Collins and Davis at the pool hall, corroborated Collins's account of Coles carrying a gun that night. He told police he watched Collins take a gun from his pants and place it on the seat. Then he saw Collins pick it up and exit the car with it. (1-II, 16)

Kevin McQueen testified that Troy Davis confessed to shooting into the car, but later retracted his trial testimony.

Mark Wilds, the driver of the car, initially told police he didn't get a good look at the shooter, but believed he was firing a .38. At 8:45 PM on August 19, after being questioned again, he amended his statement to include another detail - he had seen Troy Davis at the party. (1, 16)
Lamar Brown also saw the gunman, and told police he was wearing a white Batman shirt, black pants, and a black hat. (1, 18)

Police officer Ann Sosbe questioned Cooper in hospital after he was shot. He told her he didn't recognize the shooter, who said the man was possibly firing a .38 caliber gun, and wearing a white T-shirt, black hat and shorts. He gave an approximate height and weight for the gunman. (1, 18)
Michael Cooper gave a statement to police on June 25, 1991, containing the same information. Years later, in a 2002 affidavit, he declared he didn't know what the shooter looked like. "What is written in that statement is a lie." (6)

Now we come to Benjamin Gordon. Gordon is a highly problematic witness, because his story has changed and changed again in bizarre ways over the years.
Gordon was a relative (by marriage) of Red Coles who was present at the Cloverdale pool party. On the morning after the shootings, he gave police a more detailed description of the Cooper shooting suspect than any of the other four guys who had been in Mark Wilds's car. He said the person who fired into the car was wearing a white Batman shirt and jeans. He had seen this person at the party earlier in the night (keep in mind that Red Coles had not yet come forward at this time; the police didn't have names or faces for their suspects). He also mentioned that he had gone to the Burger King on Oglethorpe after hearing that someone had been shot there. (1, 17-18)
When called to the stand at Troy Davis's murder trial two years later, Benjamin Gordon denied everything. He denied even seeing the Cloverdale shooter. (5,10)
Nineteen years later, at Davis's June 2010 evidentiary hearing, he suddenly declared that Sylvester Coles was the party shooter, and that he had been an eyewitness to the shooting of Mark MacPhail (more on this in the section "People Who Came Forward Long After the Fact to Implicate Red Coles").

The Ballistics Evidence

Roger Parian, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) crime lab, examined bullets from all both the Cooper and MacPhail shootings, and concluded they could have come from the same gun, either a .38 Special or .357 Magnum revolver. He also examined shells found at the scenes of the Cooper and MacPhail shootings and concluded they were probably fired by the same weapon, a .38. At the trial, he stated, "In this particular case, I couldn't unequivocally say it was the same gun."

So ballistics evidence tied the shooting of Michael Cooper to the shooting of Mark MacPhail. But aside from the dodgy eyewitness testimony, where is the evidence tying a gun - any gun - to Troy Davis? Quite simply, there isn't any. We don't know if Davis possessed a gun in August '89. When he was charged with carrying a concealed weapon in 1988, that gun was confiscated and not returned to him.
We do know that Sylvester Coles owned a .38 pistol and was carrying it on August 18, 1989.

In 2003, at the request of Davis's attorneys, Parian's findings were examined by retired GBI ballistics expert Kelly Fite. Fite referred to Parian's analyses as "shoddy and questionable at best and patently wrong at worst" and "wholly lacking in reliability". But Fite's reasons for reaching this conclusion are unknown, as his report has not been made readily available.

The only other physical evidence in the case was a pair of shorts Troy Davis may have been wearing, seized from his mother's house. They were spattered with a dark substance that could have been blood (by the time DNA testing became available, the substance was too decayed for analysis). But these shorts were not submitted as evidence at trial. Judge James W. Head barred them, ruling that Virginia Davis had not assented to a search of her home.
The shorts would pop up later, however. The blood evidence is discussed in a section below, "The Appeals".
Sylvester Coles's clothing was not seized.

Eyewitnesses Who Were Not Called to the Stand at Davis's Murder Trial

Two men were with Harriet Murray in the parking lot just before MacPhail arrived. They reportedly left the scene during Coles's attack on Young, and they remain unidentified.

Of the seven soldiers in the van, only two (Sanders and Grizzard) were called as trial witnesses. This would seem to indicate that the other five soldiers didn't see anything important. However, USAF Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Lolas told police that as was lying on the backseat of the van, he heard someone banging on the side of the vehicle (this would be Larry Young, seeking help). Then he heard three gunshots. Looking out the window, he saw a black man in a white T-shirt and dark pants standing in the parking lot, his arm "surrounded by smoke". He was about 6' tall, 170 lbs. (1, 11-12)
Matthew Hughes, seated behind the driver, heard three "popping sounds" and saw he saw a black male in a light-coloured T-shirt standing over the body of a white individual. After the shooting, the this person ran toward the Trust Company Bank building. He had a slender to medium build and was approximately five' 7" to five' 9" tall. He wore dark shorts, a light-coloured baseball cap, and a light coloured t-shirt with either short or no sleeves. Mr. Hughes also saw a second individual running toward the Trust Company Bank building. This person was skinny, dressed in all dark clothes, and appeared to be carrying a gym bag. (1, 12-13)
Eric Riggins, seated beside Hughes, observed MacPhail falling to the ground. He described the shooter as a slim black man, 5'10, 160 lbs., wearing a light-coloured shirt, dark shorts, and a baseball cap. Beyond the shooter, Riggins saw a second, taller male running towards the Trust Company Bank building. (1, 13-15)
Daniel Kinsman, another soldier in the van, told police that although he couldn't identify the shooter due to the dim lighting and chaotic conditions of the scene, he was certain the shooter was firing with his left hand. Kinsman's police statement has been cited by supporters of Troy Davis because Davis was right-handed. (5, 26)

The Appeals

In his first appeal, Davis's attorneys predictably cited ineffective counsel and prejudicial pretrial publicity, but also tried to argue that Savannah (population over 137,000 at the time) was prone to "small town syndrome" and that the prosecution had dismissed too many black jurors - even though the jury that decided the case contained 7 black people.
Later appeals were more sophisticated, but some were marred by ridiculous statements from unreliable "witnesses" (see the section below this one).

Troy Davis's appeals process spanned nearly 20 years, so I can't even begin to detail it here (the Atlanta Journal Constitution has posted a helpful timeline, if you want to familiarize yourself with the basics). I'll focus on the 2010 evidentiary hearing, because this was the ultimate - and final - opportunity for Davis's attorneys to bring forth new evidence and secure a new trial. On June 23 - 25, 2010, U.S. District Court Judge William T. Moore, Jr. heard the new evidence collected by Davis's team, including recantations and the contents of a 2008 report on the "blood evidence".

The Blood Evidence

The matter of Troy Davis's "bloody shorts" is still confusing to commenators on the Davis case. A Redstate.com writer, Erick Erickson, recently had to ammend his statement that Mark MacPhail's blood was found on the shorts Davis was wearing on August 18 - 19, because it simply isn't true.

First of all, we don't know if the shorts seized by the police were actually the same pair worn by Davis on the night of the murder. No one identified them as such. They were taken from the washing machine in Virginia Davis's home.
Secondly, we don't know if the substance on the shorts was blood.
The state submitted to the evidentiary hearing a 2008 Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) report concluding that the substance on the shorts was blood. They also submitted a report of DNA typing of the item, according to a Savannah Morning News story.
Davis's attorneys tried to block the GBI report, as they possessed their own report by DNA and serology expert Dr. Charlotte Word. Word had reviewed the GBI report and made two conclusions: Human DNA was present on the shorts and "it is not possible to conclude or determine . . . that blood was present on the shorts".
Many sources (including the Savannah Morning News) didn't mention Word's report, but both analyses were submitted at the evidentiary hearing.
After reviewing them, Judge Moore concluded that “the shorts in no way linked Mr. Davis to the murder of Officer MacPhail,” and found that “it is not even clear that the substance was blood.”

Judge Moore heard recantations from Dorothy Ferrell, Antoine Williams, Kevin McQueen, and Jeffrey Sapp. Moore also heard testimony from Darrell Collins, who repeated his allegations that police had pressured him into naming his friend Troy as the gunman.

And he heard from witnesses who claimed Red Coles confessed...

People Who Came Foward Long After the Trial to Implicate Sylvester Coles

In 1996, Tonya Johnson came forward to reveal additional information about the night MacPhail was killed. At trial, she had merely presented testimony that Sylvester Coles had been at her party in Cloverdale that evening, but now she claimed that Coles and another man identified only as Terry showed up at her house sometime after 1:00 AM on August 19, carrying two handguns. Coles first asked Johnson to take possession of them, then stashed them in the doorway of a nearby vacant house. After concealing the weapons, Johnson stated, Coles warned her not to tell anyone about what he had done. (5, 35)

Anthony Hargrove, a career criminal, came forward in 2000 to inform Troy Davis that Red Coles had confessed to him around 1990.
When Hargrove was called to testify at the evidentiary hearing, Judge Moore agreed to allow his hearsay testimony, but warned the defense that unless Red Coles was called to the stand, he might give such testimony "no weight whatsoever." And that's essentially what ended up happening. (6)

Gary Hargrove came up with an even better story: He was in the parking lot, directly facing Coles, and actually saw Coles shoot Mark MacPhail both times. He just didn't tell anyone he was there until 2001, and no one else noticed his presence at all. Sure thing. Sadly, Davis's lawyers embraced Hargrove's story. Georgia Superior Court Judge Penny Freeman decided Hargrove's testimony did not constitute new evidence; it was cumulutive of existing evidence (the trial testimony of eyewitness Joseph Washington). (3)

Benjamin Gordon muddied the waters, too. Gordon was the relative of Red Coles who was present at the Cloverdale pool party, told the police the gunman wore a white T-shirt, then testified that he didn't even see the Cloverdale shooter. In 2003, he signed an affidavit stating that he did not see Troy Davis at the Cloverdale party, and that he did not read his police statement before signing it. (5, 34) This affidavit cannot be considered new evidence, because it contains information that could have been uncovered by Davis's attorneys during the appeals process. Rather, it is a 2008 affidavit signed by Gordon that could have been used at a new trial. In it, Gordon stated that Red Coles had indicated to him that he might have been the Cloverdale shooter, and that Gordon intentionally withheld this information in 2003. (3)

But Gordon destroyed whatever was left of his marginal credibility at the evidentiary hearing, when he suddenly declared that he had been an eyewitness to the shooting of Mark MacPhail. He couldn't adequately explain why he supposedly withheld this information for nearly 20 years. He had overcome his reluctance to implicate a relative-by-marriage in the Cooper shooting two years earlier, so why didn't he mention MacPhail at that time, too? We're dealing with pure manure, here.

Amnesty International has posted excerpts from the affidavits of nine people who implicated Sylvester Coles after the murder trial. (5, 34-38)

Did New Evidence Warrant a New Trial?

Were the retractions valid?

Let's face it: Most of the eyewitness testimony was poor in the first place. Steven Sanders inexplicably went from saying "the shooter wore a light shirt, that's all I know" to "that's the guy right there, sitting at the defense table." Joseph Washington never adequately explained why he was standing in a warehouse lot across the street, rather than with his friends in the parking lot. Larry Young visually identified both suspects as the person who cracked him over the head, and now says he was too drunk to identify anyone. You would be hard pressed to find less reliable witnesses than these.
Nonetheless, there is no objective reason to reject the recantations offered in the sworn affidavits (which excludes Harriet Murray's, of course). There is no evidence that any of these people were badgered, coerced, or bribed into recanting their testimony. We have to accept the fact that of the six eyewitnesses who implicated Troy Davis, four of them would not give the same testimony today. Of the two "confession" witnesses, 0 would give the same testimony today.
Judge Moore's decision that the recantations were not convincing seems to have been a subjective one.

Cumulative evidence vs. new evidence, and due diligence

For evidence to legally qualify as "new", it has to consist of things that didn't come out at trial and were not available to the defense at the time. In other words, it can't be just cumulative evidence that adds to evidence already presented.
This is the problem with much of the "new" evidence used by Davis's team during the appeals process. For instance, Tonya Johnson's affidavit was rejected as new evidence because she had been a defense witness at the murder trial; therefore, Davis's counsel knew of her, and could conceivably have obtained the additional information from her years earlier, with "due diligence".
Davis's attorneys expended a great deal of effort trying to convince judges that their evidence couldn't possibly have been uncovered at the time of trial. Examples of this are the affidavit signed by Benjamin Gordon in 2008 and the "eyewitness testimony" of Gary Hargrove, both of which were deemed as cumulative of trial testimony. In Hargrove's case, Judge Moore determined that what he allegedly saw (Sylvester Coles shooting MacPhail) wasn't any different from what defense witness Joseph Washington saw (Sylvester Coles shooting MacPhail). Davis's attorneys argued that the testimony of these two men was very different, Hargrove supposedly having a much better vantage point - he was in the parking lot, while Washington was across the street behind some trees. This argument failed. A judge ruled that this was simply more evidence that Coles could have been the gunman, not new evidence.
The conditions for a new trial in the Davis case were clearly laid out in a 2008 ruling by the Supreme Court of Georgia. In the eyes of the law, they were not met.

In my opinion, though, Davis should have received a new trial, and I believe he would have been acquitted. Not because he was necessarily innocent, but because the key witnesses who got him convicted in the first place wouldn't have done so a second time, because the physical evidence doesn't point to anyone, and because numerous new witnesses could have presented evidence that Sylvester Coles admitted to the murder of Mark MacPhail.
Do I believe all these new witnesses, all these recantations? No. Yet despite the fact that I don't buy all the trial testimony, either (particularly Sanders's miraculous feat of identifying a man he barely saw in the first place), I feel that Davis was properly convicted with the evidence available at that time.

Sources

1. decision of the United States District Court, Southern District of Georgia, Judge William T. Moore, in the case In re Troy Davis, No. CV409-130, August 24, 2010
- Part I
- Part II
2. "Brief in support of application for permission to file a second petition for writ of habeas corpus in the district court" (redacted)
3. "Brief Amicus Curiae of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice"
4. "Application for Leave to File a Second or Successive Habeas Corpus Petition, 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)"
5. "Where is the Justice for Me?: The Case of Troy Davis, Facing Execution in Georgia" Amnesty International, February 2007. Amnesty International Index: AMR 51/023/2007
6. "#TooMuchDoubt: The Story of Troy Davis" by "SwedishJewfish" @ Daily Kos.com, posted September 19/11.
7. "Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus under O.C.G.A. §§ 9-14-41 ET SEQ"

Wednesday Weirdness Roundup: More "media lookalikes"

2011-09-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

Sadly, Ed Chiarini's bizarre "media lookalikes" theory appears to be part of a larger trend in conspiranoia. I wouldn't call it a meme, exactly. It's really more of a method. A very weird, stupid and useless method. Or perhaps, as my anonymous commenter helpfully pointed out, it's the Fregoli delusion.
It seems that a dedicated corps of stay-at-home conspiracy researchers is scouring the Internets for evidence that the people they see on TV are...well...other people they see on TV. Aaron Fleszar, on his blog Exposing the Coup, explains that most of the get-rich-now scamsters you see online or on late-night infomercials are actually infamous terror suspects who are being sought by the FBI. Of course, this doesn't mean the dudes have been successfully evading the FBI on national television. It means the FBI is in on it. And it all has something to do with Castro and Sarah Palin.

Examples:

The guy in the Rich Jerk videos is actually Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Fleszar writes, "Sarah Palin claims to be a maverick and a mama grizzly. Mark Cuban came under investigation by the SEC for insider trading of a search engine company named Mamma." Oh, and both Obama and Sarah Palin claimed to have played basketball in their youth..."this isn't a coincidence." And to add some extra weirdness: Robert Johnson, a YouTuber who did parodies of the Rich Jerk videos, is actually Chicago fraudster Tony Rezko.
Mark Joyner, star of the 2007 online reality show The Next Internet Millionaire, could be Egyptian-born terror suspect Saif al-Adel.
Ted Cuiba (that's Cuba with an "i"), author of How to Get Rich on the Internet, is probably Abdul Rahman Yassin, an alleged accomplice in the '93 bombing of the World Trade Center.

I think it goes without saying that if you select the photos carefully, you can make two different people look like the same person.

Another lookalike has been found by a collector of Victorian photos. For a mere $1 million, you could have bought a portrait of Nicholas Cage (c. 1870) on eBay. The seller said Cage is probably one of the undead, reinventing himself in each century, but I think a likelier explanation is time travel. If Travis Bickle can do it, anybody can.

The Prodigal Witch XIV: Linda Blood

2011-08-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

space
Seriously, hell hath no fury...

Linda Blood is quite different from all the former Satanists we've seen so far. She actually was involved (very briefly) with an organized Satanic church, the Temple of Set (ToS), and after leaving it she did not become a born again Christian.
She frankly admits that her time as a Satanist revolved around her love affair (requited or unrequited, depending on who you ask) with Michael Aquino, founder of the Temple of Set and a favourite target of anti-occult conspiranoids.
In the '80s she jumped into the Satanic panic fray, armed with what she believed was damning information about Satanism and occultism, and continued her campaign well into the '90s with the publication of her influential (but misinformation-packed) book The New Satanists.

Aquino as he appeared on Geraldo's Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground in 1989. "Former Satanist" Lauren Stratford also appeared on this program.

She Said

Blood's romance with Aquino is not exactly chick flick material. By all accounts, it began with a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and a piece of Star Wars fanfiction.

According to Blood, in 1978 she was 34 years old and had just relocated from Greenwich Village to a New York suburb with her husband of 9 years. She had a successful career as a designer of something-or-other (the details are sketchy). In August of that year, she picked up the latest issue of Famous Monsters at her local grocery store and read one of Michael Aquino's Star Wars stories. She was entranced by its "mysterious and romantic aura" (is it just me, or is that the nerdiest thing you've ever read?).
She began a correspondence with Aquino, and was surprised to learn he was a Satanist serving in the U.S. Army. She was a bit put off by what she calls his "authoritarian politics" and his love of German philosophers like Hegel, but she appreciated his imagination and intelligence. By his third letter, she was "halfway in love with him."

Now let's hold it right here. I don't mean to insult afficianados of fanfiction (well, maybe I do), but who writes to a fanfiction author out of the blue and then becomes infatuated with that person after three letters? This indicates, at the very least, some emotional issues.
These issues become even more apparent when Blood describes the effect her correspondence had on her life. She claims it led her into the "confused and agitated state common to those who become involved with cults." How does writing letters to a Satanist equate to cult involvement? She hadn't yet joined the Temple of Set, and to sever her ties to Aquino (who lived in Colorado at the time), all she had to do was avoid licking a stamp.
I suggest it was not "cult involvement", but Blood's own actions and conflicted emotions that were causing this turmoil to herself and those close to her. She admits her husband, family, and friends were "bewildered and alarmed" by her behaviour during this time.

Her decision to join the ToS was voluntary. Aquino had told her she would have to join to learn more about it, and she did. There was no pressure to join, no cultish recruitment tactics like love-bombing. In its 3 years of existence, the ToS has never been identified as a cult by ex-members or cult watchdog groups.
In fact, Blood offers no evidence that the ToS was a cult. She writes instead of the "clannish and condescending" attitude of some members, likening the temple to an exclusive club. This may be true, but exclusivity does not a cult make. In fact, in their early phases of development, cults will take just about anyone they can get so the leader(s) can establish a power base.
She makes much of the fact that Aquino was a psychological warfare specialist for the army, without documenting any crossover from his working life to his spiritual life (by all accounts, Aquino was professional enough to separate the two).

Blood, who claims she had no prior interest in the occult, immersed herself in the ToS. In June 1979 she attended one of its annual conclaves with about 30 other Setians, and met Aquino in person for the first time.

Blood's marriage ended that year. She claims she and Aquino became lovers during a trip to Washington, and his refusal to leave his soon-to-be wife Lillith caused her great emotional distress.

Michael and Lillith Aquino

Since her love object kept his distance from her, she directed her frustration and anger at other Setians. In response, they "emotionally abused" her and ejected her from the ToS.
Her relationship with Aquino continued until early 1981. This was followed by four years of depression. She would phone Aquino and his wife and scream into their answering machine.
To indulge in a little armchair psychology for a moment, I believe what we see here is not a cult victim at all. This is an emotionally unstable woman struggling with unrequited love and rejection, bad choices, and a divorce. She projected her feelings onto Aquino and his group, branding it a cult. This excused all her own mistakes: She didn't emotionally abandon her husband for a gloomy geek - she was lured into a cult by a psy warfare specialist!

In the mid-'80s, years after her SoT experience, Blood was still out for blood. She joined the American Family Foundation (now known as the International Cultic Studies Association)*, which worked closely with the Cult Awareness Network (before the Scientologists took it over), becoming assistant editor of the two organizations' newsletters. Her contacts with other former Satanists, "ritual abuse" victims, and their support networks convinced her that certain forms of occultism pose "long-term dangers" to society. This view culminated in her 1994 book The New Satanists, which we'll examine at the end of this post.

He Said

Aquino's take on the matter is, quite frankly, more believable than Blood's. He contends that Blood became infatuated with him after reading his fiction, initiated a correspondence with him, and proceeded to pursue him aggressively for the next ten years. When he made it clear that her affection for him was not mutual, she began to leave bizarre, obscene, and abusive messages on his answering machine. Not one of them is suitable for a PG-13 blog like this one, if Aquino's transcriptions are accurate. She even heaped verbal abuse upon Aquino's elderly mother, referring to her as a "Nazi bitch".

Aquino points out that in letters Blood sent to him during her time with the Temple of Set (a few excerpts are here), she expressed delight with the ToS and wrote fondly of her fellow Setians.

At some point in the early '90s, Blood finally stopped leaving nasty phone messages. Aquino assumed she had moved on, until he learned she was working with anti-cult organizations that promoted belief in Satanic crime and Satanic ritual abuse. Then, in 1994, a subsidiary of Warner Books published The New Satanists.

The New Satanists

There isn't room here for a detailed analysis of Blood's book. Let's just say it is rather typical of earlier books on the same topic. Satanic ritual abuse is real, Satanists are dangerous criminals, yadda yadda yadda. The only thing missing is the Christian bias, though Blood's moralizing does veer awfully close to piety at times. She even argues that "occult" crime must be placed into the wider context of warfare, genocide, and terrorism. "Perhaps then we will take effective steps to combat this ancient and pesistent form of evil." (34)

Unlike most authors in this genre, Blood is actually knowledgeable about various Satanic groups in Europe and the U.S., and she makes a few valid points about the creepy links between certain Satanists and neo-Nazi/white supremacist beliefs. However, she goes seriously awry when it comes to that "occult crime". Among the absurdities she gives us:

"According to law enforcement officials, in addition to child and adult pornography and prostitution, they [Satanists] are involved in drug and arms trafficking and serious forms of while collar crime such as computer scams and insurance fraud." No sources. No examples. People who self-identify as Christians have engaged in all these crimes, so should we also worry about a wave of "Christian crime"? (21)
Listing examples of weird S&M porn involving dead animals, gore, etc., she asks, "Where does porn end and satanic ritual begin?". (21)
She attacks skepticism, essentially saying that because of it, guilty men like Robert Kelly and Paul Ingram are being considered falsely convicted. Sadly for her, these are textbook examples of false conviction.
"In the West Memphis case, the local Crittendon County authorities had been forewarned." Librarians had reported books with sacrifice/cannibalism passages underlined, and there was suspicion of rituals and animal sacrifices in the area. I don't understand how this in any way constitutes "forewarning" of a triple child murder. Does this woman honestly believe such a crime may have been averted by arresting kids who scribble in library books? Should the police have staked out wooded areas to prevent Satanists from legally gathering? The more you think about her statement, the more ridiculous it becomes. (Keep in mind that this book was written before the trials even commenced.)

Blood makes her distaste for Satanism clear, calling it one of many "philosophical hazardous waste dumps" and a "sophomoric junk-food substitute for serious intellectual challenge to dogmas". After covering its history and its tenuous connection to crimes ranging from graffiti-spraying to cannibal holocausts, she zeroes in on Aquino. Specifically, the Presidio affair and its aftermath.

Hysteria, Hoax, or Cover-up?

In 1986, California parents were seriously concerned about their daycare centres. And you can't really blame them. For the first time in the history of daycare, toddlers were complaining of bizarre forms of abuse involving costumes, movie cameras, the Devil, dungeons and secret tunnels, and murder. In Manhattan Beach, a grandmother and several members of her family stood trial for allegedly molesting and satanically abusing kids, using a secret tunnel beneath their daycare centre to access a specially-constructed ritual chamber. In Berkeley, a psychiatrist and his mentally ill wife were informing anyone who would listen that their son and countless other children had been raped and tortured by a large group of adults wearing robes and masks. It took the boy's mother 20 years to admit the abuse never occurred.

And in San Francisco, a 3-year-old boy informed his mother that "Mr. Gary" had touched his penis and sodomized him with a pencil at the Childhood Development Center, an Army-run daycare located on the Presidio Army base. He was referring to Gary Hambright, a 34-year-old substitute teacher who worked at the centre. Hambright had been substitute teaching in Bay Area schools since the late '70s, without any complaints lodged against him.

Joyce and Mike Tobin did not report the suspected abuse, but an army chaplain who heard the story from Mike relayed it to the base's Criminal Investigation Division (CID). An investigation was immediately launched.
Using an "anal wink" test, now discredited as a tool for diagnosing sexual abuse, Dr. Kevin Coulter of the Child Adolscent Sexual Abuse Referral Center at San Francisco General Hospital determined the Tobin boy had been sodomized.
In early December, about two weeks after the CID investigation began, a strategy group was formed to address the possibility of multiple victims, though there had been no other complaints against Hambright. This may have been prudent, but the CID's next move was not. Just as police did in the McMartin case, the Army mailed letters to every parent who had a child in Hambright's care at the Childhood Development Center - 242 people. This letter may have sparked hysteria among parents, causing them to see warning signs that didn't really exist. Presidio parents began to see nightmares, bedwetting, masturbation, and other normal childhood events as evidence of sexual abuse.

Five of the roughly 60 preschoolers who may have been molested tested positive for chlamydia at Letterman Army Medical Center. However, it later emerged that the wrong kind of culture was taken and the tests were invalid.
The stories told by the children included bizarre, "ritual" elements. One child alleged that Hambright dressed up as a "bad lobster". Another claimed Hambright murdered and resurrected him. Others spoke of guns being fired, animals being slaughtered, and sex acts being filmed by Hambright and other adults at the CDC. Yet no physical evidence was uncovered during the course of four separate investigations (by the CID, San Francisco police, the FBI, and the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco).
Nonetheless, Gary Hambright was arrested in late '86 and charged with abusing the Tobin child. The charges were dropped three months later, after Judge William Schwarzer refused to allow hearseay statements from parents to be used at trial. The U.S. Attorney's office decided that without this inadmissable hearsay evidence, the case against Hambright was simply too weak to take to trial.

I'll note here that Blood gets many basic facts of the case wrong. She tells us that Hambright was arrested and charged in January '87, when this actually occurred in December '86.

That should have ended the matter, but things were about to get far stranger at the Presidio. After Hambright's arrest, Army chaplain Larry Adams-Thompson reported that his 3-year-old stepdaughter (real name Kinsey, here called "Lisa") was wetting the bed and having nightmares. She had been under Hambright's supervision four or five times in '86.
Questioned by the FBI, Kinsey denied that anyone had touched her inapppropriately. However, a therapist at Letterman Army Medical Center said she spoke of being abused by Hambright, a man named "Mikey", and a woman named "Shamby", on several occasions.

On August 12, 1987, 4-year-old Kinsey spotted Lt. Col. Michael Aquino at the Presidio Post Exchange and hid behind her stepfather. Larry and his wife, Michelle, asked her if she knew the man. "Yes, that's Mikey," she reportedly replied. In the parking lot, Larry Adams-Thompson saw Lillith Aquino, pointed her out to Kinsey, and asked if she recognized her. "Yes, that's Shamby," Kinsey allegedly told him.

Kinsey was re-interviewed by FBI Special Agent Clyde Foreman the following day. This time she described being abused by the three adults in "Mr. Gary's house", which had black walls and a "plastic lion's foot tub". She was taken to the 2400 block of Leavenworth Street to see if she would recognize the Aquinos' house, and she did indeed point out the residence, calling it "Mr. Gary's house."
When San Francisco police searched the Aquinos' house, they found that the living room was painted black. Despite a yearlong investigation by the SFPD, however, no evidence of wrongdoing by either Aquino was found. The case was closed in April of '88.

Michael Aquino was re-assigned to Missouri because of the adverse publicity the investigation attracted. In its November 16, 1987 issue, Newsweek ran a story on Aquino headlined "THE SECOND BEAST OF REVELATION". For the first time, Aquino appeared on TV to discuss his religion, in an effort to allay fears that Satanists like to abuse, torture, abduct, and eat children. This is when several preschoolers supposedly recognized him and told their parents he was one of the adults who ritually abused them in various daycare centres throughout the U.S. (What Blood doesn't mention is that no criminal charges were filed in these cases, due to lack of evidence. They include allegations against sisters Barbara and Sharon Orr at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.)

Hambright was rearrested and once again faced federal charges (because the alleged abuse occurred on a military base). This second set of charges was dropped six months later for lack of evidence. The federal investigation into the Presidio allegations was shut down in September of '88. By that time, a group of Presidio parents led by Larry Adams-Thompson were loudly crying cover-up. In June, some of them filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Army, seeking $55 million in damages. A settlement was reached, and the family of Kinsey Adams-Thompson received over $300,000.

It's not unheard of for the military to hush up deviant behaviour on the part of officers. For instance, the prime suspect in the 1959 murder of Lynne Harper should have been Royal Canadian Air Force Sgt. Alexander Kalichuk, but civilian police were not informed of his arrest for attempting to entice preteen girls into his vehicle. The army kept a lid on that, allowing a 14-year-old boy to be falsely convicted and sentenced to death.
But was there a military cover-up in the case of the accusations against Aquino? Probably not. Here are a few factors militating in favour of Aquino's innocence:

Aside from Kinsey Adams-Thompson, the kids identified him only after seeing him on TV. They did not give descriptions of him prior to that time - and let's face it, anyone who sees this guy is going to remember him.
His alibi has never been challenged. He was all the way across the country when the abuse supposedly occurred. During the time that Kinsey Adams-Thompson was in daycare (September 1 - October 31, 1986) he was attending daily classes at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
Is it likely that Aquino and his alleged cohorts could usher screaming, crying children in and out of Aquino's house without being noticed? The Aquinos lived in a fairly quiet neighbourhood, and did not have children of their own.
Prior to the '80s, no one complained of sexual misconduct on Aquino's part. He had no known interest in children at all, much less sexual interest. This would be quite unusual for a pedophile.
There is absolutely no evidence that Aquino was acquainted with Gary Hambright, nor anyone else at the Child Development Center. One has to wonder how a civilian Baptist and an Army Satanist would even meet.
Because the alleged abuse occurred off-base, in the Aquinos' home, it was a civilian matter. For a military cover-up to occur, the Army would have had to effectively interfere with the SFPD and the FBI. Not likely.
As the events below demonstrate, the Army itself was suspicious of Aquino and wanted to get rid of him.

The Aftermath

Again, this should have ended the matter. But the accustions of cover-up, together with public outrage over Aquino's religious affiliation, left the Army feeling uneasy. In late 1988, CID investigators reviewed documents related to the Aquino investigation and picked out what they felt were the six strongest allegations against him. Investigators assembled "lineups" using Oprah footage and footage of Aquino lookalikes/soundalikes, and the children (number not given by Blood) unerringly picked out the real Aquino.
For this reason, the Army "titled" Aquino for indecent acts with a child, sodomy, conspiracy, kidnapping, indecent acts, and false swearing.

There are no easy answers in the Presidio case. Because most of the children were too young to remember their daycare experiences as adults, even they don't know for certain if they were abused.
But I do have a theory about what may have happened here. I suspect that Hambright's homosexual orientation terrified several parents at the Presidio. Giving in to fears that gay men who look after children could be pedophiles, some of these parents looked too hard for evidence of sexual molestation - and of course they found it. Everything from temper tantrums to bad dreams could be chalked up to abuse-related trauma. Once the CID investigation began, hysteria took over.

The allegations against Aquino may have been of a very different nature, though. Aquino maintained from the start that Larry Adams-Thompson fabricated Kinsey's allegations, and the later behaviour of the Adams-Thompsons unfortunately points in that direction.
After receiving their $300,000 settlement from the government, they placed half the money in trust for Kinsey, stipulating that she would become a co-trustee when she turned 18.
Kinsey moved in with her biological father at the age of 13. When she turned 18, the lawyer retained by her mother and stepfather assured her she would be given a copy of the trust documents to review before she signed on as a co-trustee. She had one month to sign. If she did not sign in that time, the money would default to the Adams-Thompsons.
Larry Adams-Thompson promptly filed a lawsuit against his teenage stepdaughter in an attempt to delay the signing process and secure the trust fund for himself. Luckily for Kinsey, a probate court terminated the trust. She was given not only her share of the trust monies, but compensation for her legal expenses, as well. This is documented in an appeal stemming from the lawsuit Kinsey filed against her stepdad's lawyer.
It is my opinion that any man who would attempt to screw his teen stepdaughter out of her trust fund is the same kind of man who would fabricate abuse allegations in order to sue the government.
Aquino was an easy target, because his Satanism was known beyond his inner circle of superiors and peers. Who would the authorities believe: An Army chaplain, or a devil worshiper?

After his Satanism became a subject of nationwide interest, more "ritual abuse victims" crawled out of the woodwork to accuse Aquino. In the early '90s, a young male prostitute named Paul Bonacci even accused him of purchasing Johnny Gosch, a 12-year-old boy abducted in Iowa in 1982. That allegation was too groundless to warrant investigation, and Bonacci was never charged with his supposed role in the Gosch abduction. But the story continues to be propagated by numerous conspiracy researchers (and Johnny's own mother) as part of the "Franklin cover-up".

Linda Blood's book, though now outdated and discredited, remains influential. It is often cited as a source in other anti-occult literature.

* Some of Blood's work, such as this 1991 paper co-written with deprogrammer Kevin Garvey, is available on the ICSA website.

The Prodigal Witch XIII: Eric Pryor

2011-08-20T21:43:00.000-07:00

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The writers at Cornerstone magazine, in exposing the make-believe story of Lauren Stratford, referred to the hoax as "Satan's sideshow". If Stratford was the sideshow, the late Eric Pryor was the whole circus.

Eric Pryor in 1990

Eric Pryor literally appears to have crawled out of some woodwork. Suddenly, on Halloween 1990, this strange, gawky man with bleached-blonde hair and weird blue eyes appears in front of the San Francisco Civic Auditorium with an eclectic mob of neo-Pagans, gays, and Satanists from the Bay area (see video clips below).
Pryor loudly announces they're going to perform a "public binding" against Texas televangelist Larry Lea, a vocal opponent of all things occult and gay who is holding one of his "Prayer Breakthrough" rallies at the Auditorium that night. Pryor dramatically burns and hacks up a candle representing Lea, to the amusement of onlookers and TV cameramen. Then the protesters return to their usual lives, and Pryor gets a full-time job preaching the gospel at Jubilee Christian Center, a Pentacostal megachurch in San Jose.

A sample of Larry Lea's work

Really. It seems that sometime in between the chanting and the effigy-torching, Pryor decided Bible-thumping wasn't so bad after all.
The day after his protest, he appeared on the San Francisco TV show People are Talking alongside Dick Bernal, head of Jubilee Christian Center. He identified himself as a Wiccan who wanted to prevent witch hunts from breaking out in the Bay area, and was ostensibly trying to prove that neo-Pagans are just like any other socially conscious citizens, worthy of respect and tolerance. But then he screwed the pooch re-enacting a "Wiccan ceremony" he performed on a young woman (his girlfriend Cassandra, as it turned out). In what appeared to be an exorcism, Pryor crouched over Cassandra, making repeated stabbing motions with his athame while chanting something in Hebrew. Public response to the video was less than enthusiastic. Pagans were annoyed, and Christians were appalled. (4)

But the Christians were soon rejoicing, because after the TV appearance, Pryor agreed to meet with Dick Bernal and attend Lea's service at Jubilee, all expenses paid. On November 17, he was saved. He even allowed his new brothers and sisters in Christ to clear his apartment temple of witchcraft paraphernalia and burn it in a bonfire.
By the end of the year he was in the pulpit as yet another "witch who switched".
As a Wiccan, Pryor had called himself Lord Gandalf. He claimed to have been the head of the Wiccan New Earth Temple in San Francisco, but no one in the Pagan subculture seemed to know him before his Larry Lea protest, and the "temple" was located in Pryor's apartment.
At first, he claimed to have had about 75 local followers. In 1991 he claimed "tens of thousands" of followers. (3) On a January 1992 broadcast of his TV show Change Your Life, Larry Lea said he had led 50,000 Pagans. (4)
But he revealed that he was more than just a born again neo-Pagan; in New York, he had been a prostitute and belonged to a Satanic cult that delighted in luring strangers to their temple to brutalize and torture. They didn't actually sacrifice anyone, but they came pretty close.
Weirdly, Pryor also said he had been born again once before (a notion that most Christians reject - you're born again once, period, and any reversion to your former ways is merely backsliding). This was around 1977, when he was still a teenager.
Further underscoring the supposedly violent nature of occultism, Pryor told Larry Lea that if he hadn't realized Lea was an okay guy, he might have ended up shooting him. He claimed he had a gun stuffed into his cowboy boot during the protest. Later, he claimed he and the other Pagans were equipped with an entire arsenal: automatic weapons, grenades, dynamite. (4)
As we will see, Pryor was not allowed to possess firearms, yet prominently displayed guns in his apartment and bragged of carrying a shotgun everywhere for protection against Pagan assassins. With his avowed history of violence and homicidal intentions, this should have alarmed his Christian friends. But it did not. They apparently chalked it up to his charming eccentricity. Pryor liked to dress all in black with a Stetson, snakeskin boots, and a duster coat, like some kind of spaghetti Western vigilante. At other times he would don Army fatigues and call himself a "Christian soldier".

Jubilee Christian Center in San Jose, CA

As an evangelist, Pryor specialized in "slaying in the spirit" (sending people into an ecstatic state, knocking them to the ground with a light touch or a spoken command). His services somewhat resembled mass exorcisms, with people flopping into the arms of Pryor's assistants or onto the floor as he hollered invectives against the Devil. A transcript of one of his services shows that by early '91 he was already well-schooled in the evangelistic style, knowing just when to fire up the audience and when to pluck their heartstrings. He used just the right combination of humorous patter and earthy spirituality.
Bernal seemed delighted with his catch, referring to Pryor as "the Chief Wiccan of the Wicca cult". (4) As a former witch, a former Satanist, and a former prostitute, Pryor was the ideal evangelistic tool for a gay-friendly, Pagan-friendly region. If he had some faults, they could be politely overlooked.

The exact nature of Pryor's position at Jubilee Christian Center has remained murky, as Dick Bernal gave inconsistent statements about it. He told ABC's Primetime Live in November 1991 that Pryor received an income of $1000 per month. One month later he told the San Jose Mercury News that Pryor received $500 per month, and had his own office. (3) In 1996 he told the Metro newspaper that Pryor did not get a salary from Jubilee and was not on staff, but admitted that Pryor got to pocket the donations for all the services he held at Jubilee (though Bernal didn't mention it, Pryor also made money from videotapes that sold for $12-$45 per copy). (5)
The San Francisco Chronicle's Herb Caen reported Pryor made $100,000 in his first year of preaching. Pryor refuted this, insisting he was nearly broke. But he was wearing a Rolex as he said it. (3)
Whatever Pryor's actual income and position in the church, he did not have any other employment during the 7 years he spent there. His evangelistic roadshow, Christian Gladiator Ministries, operated out of Jubilee. By 1996, he was charging $1300-$1700 per show. (5)

In addition to his preaching, Pryor also became one in a long line of "occult crime experts" who attributed every pentacle spray-painted on an underpass to Satanic criminal gangs. Absurdly, he declared in 1996, "I'm the only one I know of in the country who does this type of investigation." (3)
His only major gig in this capacity was a "Satanic crime" seminar held on July 26, 1991 at a church in Vancouver, British Columbia.
He told the assembled law enforcement officers that Pagans usually act as front-people for Satanic organizations that are involved in criminal enterprises, and urged them to do undercover work against Pagans to expose their "real" activities. He even provided phone numbers of Pagans to get them started.
To bolster his contention that all Pagans and Satanists are bad news, he admitted to committing all sorts of crimes as a Satanist in New York and San Francisco: stockpiling weapons, robbing graves and churches, blackmailing other occultists. He said, "The occult community encompasses murder, drugs and homosexuality. The stuff I share with you could easily get me killed. New Age and Occult practices are becoming more popular and as it becomes more popular it is a cover for criminality."
He even hinted that Freemasons were part of this occult criminal underworld, claiming his temple had been located inside a Masonic hall (as we know, it was located only in his apartment). He said Satanists commit ritual sacrifices several times a year, breed babies for sacrifice and sale, abduct teenagers, and provide young children to pedophiles (he libelously claimed that the Temple of Set supplies young boys to NAMBLA).
Like ex-Satanists John Todd, Mike Warnke, and Doc Marquis, he claimed the Pagans would have murdered him for defecting. It was all the publicity that attended his conversion to Christianity that scared them away, he said. Nonetheless, he carried a shotgun with him at all times for protection. (4)
Law enforcement agencies were obviously not keen to enlist Pryor's help, so he resorted to handing out a "Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults" videotape instead. In the video, as in his British Columbia presentation, he placed peculiar emphasis on the link between Paganism (Satanic crime) and homosexuality. This was not an accident. In June 1991, he told a church audience in Cameron Park, "My goal is to destroy Satanism, humanism, paganism, druidism and the practice of homosexuality in our lifetime." (3)

In November 1991 he wed his girlfriend, Cassandra, in a Jubilee ceremony at which Dick Bernal officiated. Sandra had converted to Christianity, too.

Cassandra and Eric Pryor "marry" (Primetime Live)

"The witch who switched" garnered considerable mainstream media attention, much of it negative. In November 1991 ABC's Primetime Live looked into Pryor as part of its investigation into the ministries of Larry Lea and other televangelists. Diane Sawyer said, "We discovered right away Eric Pryor was never a major leader of the Pagans." Primetime also learned his first marriage had never been dissolved, and the ceremony with Cassandra was just for show (Bernal even admitted he knew Pryor was already married). The man who filmed the ceremony, Eric Marsh, claims he saw Bernal and Pryor "signing what appeared to be a wedding license. Pryor started to ask me if I would like to witness it but Bernal cut him off."
There is no doubt that Pryor tried to pass this off as a legal union. Lea proudly told Diane Sawyer that Eric had married his live-in girlfriend, and Pryor himself announced to a Denver audience that he was a married man (which was true enough, but the woman he named wasn't his wife). (6)
Also, despite the fact that donations were pouring in during his spectacular church services, Pryor had not resumed child support payments for his two children from his first marriage (a warrant was issued against him for nonsupport in 1993).
Diane Sawyer also revealed that Larry Lea's ministry had been giving Pryor money. (2)
The Mercury News reported that Jubilee moved Pryor out of his Tenderloin hovel, buying him a golf course condo in Santa Clara. Bernal claimed the move was strictly a safety precaution, as San Francisco Pagans were gunning for Pryor. (3) (Pryor complained that Pagans were attacking and menacing him, but he was the only one throwing around unsubstantiated accusations and behaving in a threatening manner. He continually warned Christian audiences that Pagans and Satanists are child-stealing, murderous perverts. He also encouraged the police to harass them and interfered with their ceremonies.)

There has been speculation that Larry Lea, Dick Bernal, and/or someone in their ministries hired Eric Pryor to fake a miraculous conversion as a publicity stunt, and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence for that. It's also possible that Pryor engineered the stunt himself: One former Pagan who met Pryor shortly before the anti-Lea demonstration, Eric Marsh, claims Pryor discussed "putting on 'an act' of going over to the Christians so that he could go undercover and get the dirt' on them."
Lea is certainly not above suspicion. Like so many televangelists before and after him, he has a history of scamming. The same year he saved Pryor, he held a fund drive to build the first Christian church at Auschwitz. However, the church had already existed for two years and was paid for entirely by Polish Pentacostals. Lea gave the church a $30,000 donation, but his ministry had nothing to do with its creation. (2)

Eric's Prior Life

Details of Pryor's early life are sketchy, and the information he gave about his background varied over time.
He was born in 1959. He said his childhood in Woodstock, New York, was marred by neglect and abuse. He was often in foster care due to his mother's mental illness. He spent much of his time studying occult books at the public library. (5) He was attracted to occultism, in part, because one of his grandfathers was a founding member of the American Nazi party and practiced mystical Nazism (Pryor stated, incorrectly, that Hitler himself was an initiate of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis). When he was 10 years old, the neo-Nazis burned some sort of insignia onto young Eric's right arm to mark him as one of their own (he never displayed it publicly). (4) Like several of the people we've seen in this series, Pryor claimed a childhood devotion to God that paved the way for salvation later in life. Just as Lauren Stratford described asking Jesus to be her daddy when she was 4 years old, Pryor said he knelt down at the age of 4 and asked God to be his daddy. (6) Pardon my cynicism, but I suspect he had a copy of Satan's Underground in that Santa Clara condo.

Because of the abuse, Eric ran away from home and became a child prostitute in New York City at the age of 12. He met Herman Slater, owner of the city's most famous occult bookstore, Magickal Childe. It was Slater, he said, who initiated him into Wicca and tutored him in the occult. Eric was such a quick study that Slater commissioned him to write sections of the two-volume Book of Pagan Rituals (1974-75) when he was just 14 years old. By the time he was 15, he said, "People were already starting to name babies after me! I was like a Mozart of the occult community, the prodigal child!" (6)
As a Christian, Pryor viciously (but ridiculously) slandered Slater by stating that Magickal Child sold snuff videos via its mail-order catalogues, and that Slater and other Pagans used him as a teenage temple prostitute.

He went on to study under Lady Sabrina of the Wiccan school Our Lady of Enchantment and Carol Bulzone, a witch of the Welsh tradition. For a time he worked at Bulzone's occult bookshop, Enchantments. He was later granted a certificate of ordination by Gavin and Yvonne Frost's Church of Wicca, and reached the third level of Gardnerian Wicca under priestess Rolla Nordic. He referred to himself as a Welsh High Priest and a reverend. He worked with prominent witch Laurie Cabot and Pagan musicians Kenny and Tzipora Klein.

Prior to being born again, he was also a Satanist thug, a parapsychologist with an honorary doctorate from the American Parapsychology Research Association, and a licensed funeral director and mortician (which enabled him to procure bodies and body parts for necromancy).
There's no evidence that Pryor had any sort of honorary doctorate, nor that he ever possessed a mortician's license, but we do know he made the abrupt leap from Wicca to Satanism sometime in the late '70s or early '80s. Just as he would later do in California, he tried to draw teenagers into his orbit. We also know that he had a rather lengthy criminal record. (4)

In 1982 he wed his first wife, Nichole, in a prison ceremony. He was serving time for a drunken assault, and fighting extradition to Texas on armed robbery charges of which he would ultimately be convicted.
The Pryors had two children. Though he never mentioned this part of his past to his born again friends, the marriage was volatile. Pryor was once arrested for shooting out the windows of his house while Nichole and their son were inside. She left him around 1987.

In 1988, Eric sought the greener pastures of California. He established his New Earth Temple in his San Francisco apartment and joined the Bay Area Pagan Assemblies. He later claimed, falsely, that he was a board member of BAPA.
Two years later, he found Jesus.

Pryor established a somewhat respectable Christian life for himself, or so it seemed at first. After his "marriage" to Sandra ended, he wed a young Christian mother, Shelly Kolt, in July 1994.
Sadly, while Eric's zeal for devil worship may have faded, his penchant for violence had not. Just one month after his wedding he was charged with spousal abuse and assault with a deadly weapon (a knife). During his arrest by Mountain View police, he lashed out drunkenly and had to be placed in restraints. He later insisted that Shelly was the real aggressor, though she had no record of domestic assault, and complained the police "failed to protect" him.
So did a judge, apparently. Pryor spent several months of 1995 in jail.
According to Shelly, Eric assaulted her and threatened to kill her because she was considering leaving him. At that time, according to court records, Pryor was negotiating a six-figure book and TV deal with the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and the deal required him to remain married (to one woman at a time, of course). (5)

Pryor soon married his assistant, another young Christian mother named Renee.

The Witch Who Switched and Then Switched Again and Then Switched Again and Then Switched Again

The story so far is that Eric Pryor was a witch who briefly became a Christian in the late '70s, then returned to Wicca, then became a Satanist simultaneously (though Wicca and Satanism are incompatible belief systems), then became a Christian again.

Exactly 7 years after being born again, Pryor parted ways with Jubilee and Christ. He grumbled about the church's "money-grubbing" and "hypocrisy".
The following year, he and a small gaggle of New Age followers rented a 38-room mansion Pryor claimed was once owned by Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery and set up the Serene Foundation to endorse a peculiar mix of Christianity, Satanism and shamanism. Pryor pledged to cure drug addiction and other disorders with natural healing and faith healing, claiming to possess potent gifts, and announced his intention to train a team of "shamanic prophets" to perform the same feats. His decision to become a full-time healer is unnerving in light of what he told a Christian audience in Salem, Massachusetts, back in 1992: As a Wiccan, he said, he charged clients "a thousand dollars to put a piece of quartz crystal on their heads and burn enough incense to kill a thousand mosquitoes." (4)
The Serene Foundation's grand opening was held on Halloween, with teenagers invited to join a "healing circle" at the mansion.

Pryor cultivated a new, kookier image and excitedly courted the small amount of media attention his return to Satanism attracted. He took to wearing leopard-print robes and colourful Satanic vestments embroidered with crosses.

Though he boasted of commanding $20,000 per public appearance as an evangelist, the truth was much sadder. The money he earned with Jubilee Christian Center and Christian Gladiator Ministries was mostly gone by the end of the 1998. He could no longer afford the rent on the Bewitched mansion and had to relocate his temple of healing to a jumble of ramshackle buildings on Vine Hill Road, optimistically named Happy Valley Estates. He tried to establish a halfway rehab house for teens, and held healing services on a cement "healing table" in the yard of the Happy Valley mansion. Various priests, priestesses, and spiritual seekers found their way to the Foundation to take shrooms and grab some enlightenment, but it never drew the kind of attention or funds Pryor seemed to crave.
His spirituality seemed to consist of a melange of Satanism, Native American traditions, and Wicca. He made his teenage stepdaughter a "high priestess". In short, he was probably the only person in this series to have a real life every bit as weird as his fantasy life.

And now things get just a little stranger. According to an obituary published by the Christian magazine Charisma in 2009, Pryor resumed Christian preaching. After moving to Carson City, Nevada, in the late '90s, he and Renee founded a Christian ministry called Peculiar Nation, and Pryor preached occasionally at churches and Christian events until the time of his death.
It's quite possible that Peculiar Nation was a Pagan or Satanic effort that Charisma mistook for a Christian ministry (the author doesn't even mention Pryor's defection from the church), but given Pryor's erratic nature, I wouldn't be shocked if he tried to return to the fold.

And stranger still, Pryor reinvented himself as a pop artist.
Now, instead of being a teen prostitute and a wicked Satanist during his New York years, he was assistant to Andy Warhol at the Factory, studied advertising and design at New York University's Center for the Media Arts and worked as an illustrator at Dentsu Advertising. He later earned a degree from the California College of Fine art and pioneered what he called the "neo-byzentine-pop" [sic] art style.
Needless to say, not one of these things actually happened. And the artist's bio, apparently written by Pryor himself, sheds a very bright light on his years as a witch/former witch/former former witch: "Both classically trained and self taught, Mr. Pryor's work has become very successful and his 'antics' & 'episodes' have become fodder for many national and international news stories both in print and on air."

What Was Eric Pryor, Exactly?

A witch? A Satanist? A Christian pretending to be a former Satanist? A Former Satanist pretending to be a Christian? An attention whore? A performance artist? A very confused man?

Damned if I know.
It's quite possible that Pryor's 1990 conversion was a PR stunt. In addition to the statements made by Pagans he knew (see below) and the statement in his artist's bio, the Primetime Live investigation discovered that Larry Lea's ministry gave Pryor cash after his conversion.
What is obvious is that despite all his alleged instruction from experienced East Coast Wiccans, Pryor had an incredibly weak understanding of Paganism, Satanism, and the occult. In a video presentation produced by Jubilee Christian Center shortly after his conversion, From Pagan to Pentacost, Pryor referred to a paperback copy of the Simon Necronomicon as an ancient and evil tome. He called temples "covendoms" and Pagan grottoes "groves". He declared that only Wiccans can become Satanists (false), said Hitler was an OTO and Golden Dawn member (false), and performed an exorcism (something Pagans and Satanists generally don't do; they seldom believe in literal demons).

Since evangelical Christians tend to embrace former witches and ex-Satanists without any sort of background checks, sorting out the facts and factoids of Pryor's many claims fell to the Pagan community. Investigations were undertaken by BAPA (to which Pryor had belonged only briefly, never serving on the board), Covenant of the Goddess, and Kerr Cuhulain. Their findings revealed that Pryor may have associated with at least one Satanist in New York (a guy named Pete Colon), but his stellar Wiccan credentials were b.s.:

Pryor did meet Herman Slater as a youth, but he was 17, not 12. This would have been around 1977, the exact same time Pryor was supposedly born again. If that date is correct, Pryor could not possibly have helped Slater compile A Book of Pagan Rituals. Slater vaguely recalled that Lady Rhea, his high priestess, may have initiated Eric into the Welsh tradition.
Carol Bulzone never met Pryor. And as a participant in all the initiation rituals done by Lady Rhea since 1975, she was certain Lady Rhea never initiated Pryor.
Lady Sabrina said she never heard of Pryor, and could find no record of Pryor taking the correspondence course offered by Our Lady of Enchantment.
Gavin and Yvonne Frost didn't know Pryor, have no record of him as one of their mail order students, and did not ordain him.
Rolla Nordic also said she had never met Pryor, and couldn't have initiated him into a Gardnerian tradition because she was a practitioner of the Welsh tradition. In January 1991, after Pryor's conversion to Christianity, he sent Rolla Nordic an initiation certificate he created himself, asking Nordic to sign it. It stated Pryor was initiated by Nordic in 1977. Clearly, he was hoping Nordic would sign the thing without question. She didn't.
Laurie Cabot stated she did not know Pryor, and he had no involvement with her Witches' League for Public Awareness.
In the early '80s, Kenny and Tzipora Klein gave Pryor and his first wife a place to shower when they were homeless in New York, and that was all. They didn't work together. In September 1990, Kenny and Tzipora ran into Eric at a benefit concert in Oakland, California. He told them that he'd just come into large amount of money and was organizing a benefit concert for the homeless for Jubilee Christian Center (there was no such concert). He also mentioned he was organizing the demonstration against Larry Lea. Now that's odd. By all accounts, Eric had no affiliation with Jubilee prior to the Lea protest. This lends some support to the theory that the entire Lea affair was a mock-protest, designed to hype Lea's crusade and introduce a Satanist-turned-Christian to Jubilee (as we have seen, evangelical and Pentacostal churches love to have their own in-house former Satanists). Kerr Cuhulain learned from the Kleins that Larry Lea may have been the chaplain of the Texas prison where Pryor served his sentence for armed robbery, and speculates the two men could have met at that time. Eric's attempt to establish Wiccan credentials for himself after becoming a Christian also hints at something funky about his dramatic conversion. Is it possible that Larry Lea persuaded a prison inmate to stage a mock-protest and a mock-conversion? Or did Pryor, knowing about Lea from his time in Texas, simply decide to protest his presence in a city that is, for the most part, friendly to gays and Pagans? We'll probably never know. (4)

Eric's account of his childhood may be more legit than his Wiccan credentials. An uncle told the Wiccan researchers that Eric left home at the age of 14 and became a prostitute, developing drug and alcohol problems. In California, he finally sought psychiatric and medical treatment for his substance abuse issues. After being born again, however, he went off his meds and discontinued therapy, falling back into his old patterns of drinking, drugs, and violent behaviour.

On June 7, 2009, Pryor was hit by a truck while crossing a street in Carson City, Nevada, and died of his injuries.

Sources:

1. "6500 Christians Attend S.F. 'Exorcism'" by Don Lattin and David Tuller. San Francisco Chronicle. November 1, 1990.
2. Primetime Live report "The Apple of God's Eye." Broadcast November 21, 1991. (available on YouTube)
3. "Reborn Again?" by Dave O'Brien. San Jose Mercury News. December 14, 1991.
4. "Eric Pryor" by Kerr Cuhulain @ Witchvox
5. "Prophet Seeking" by Bob Hansen. 1996 Metro article @ Metroactive.com.
6. Transcript of testimony given by Eric Pryor at Victory in Jesus Church in Denver, Colorado, on February 4, 1991
7. "The Witch Who Switched Back" by Traci Hukill. October 29-November 4, 1998 issue of Metro @ Metroactive.com.

The Prodigal Witch XII: Doc Marquis

2011-08-05T12:53:00.000-07:00

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Doc Marquis lecturing for The Prophecy Club, c. 1997

In the mid '80s, an Illuminati defector and former devil worshiper known as Joseph "Doc" Marquis slipped into the niche vacated by John Todd, who was serving time for a rape conviction. Marquis started out as a virtual John Todd clone, but proved to be far more resilient than his predecessor. For the past two decades, Marquis has deftly surfed the waves of Christian conspiracy culture.

An unassuming, clean-cut guy with a slight speech impediment, Marquis speaks calmly and softly, eschewing the brimstone theatrics and stand-up schtick that many ex-Satanists use to spice up their acts.
But his claims are transparently absurd, tailored for the same crowd that insists John Todd was framed by Illuminati overlords. In fact, Marquis was a supporter of Todd's work and discredited himself early on by parroting Todd's nonsense. Then he made things even worse for himself by declaring that Mike Warnke, Rebecca Brown, Elaine Moses and Lauren Stratford were Illuminati members, too. As we have seen, all these people crafted alternate histories for themselves in the '70s and '80s. (1)

There's some question as to whether Marquis can really call himself a former Satanist, since he has stated the Illuminati believes in Lucifer, not Satan, and holds Satanists in disdain (if this makes any sense, let me know). His real cachet is as a former Illuminati member. (2)

Marquis's first notable appearance was on the June 24, 1987 broadcast of Oprah. Though he began speaking publicly about his past sometime in the early '80s, this was his first major gig. The show dealt with Wicca, and Marquis (as a "former Illuminati member") was a nay-sayer, brought on to warn of the hazards of witchcraft alongside evangelist/exorcist Bob Larson. For the record, Oprah was open to everything Marquis had to say and at times chided other guests for questioning his more absurd statements about human sacrifice. After describing a previous guest who supposedly suffered Satanic ritual abuse, she said, "Just because... nobody found the bodies and nobody called in to a newspaper and said human sacrifices are going on, doesn't mean that it does not exist." (2)

If she had known more about his background, she might not have been so open. Prior to Oprah, Marquis was a supporter of The Family International and gave lectures at the church's Friendswood Home in Houston. (3)
The Family was once known as The Children of God, and under the leadership of the crazed pedophile David "Moses" Berg, its members were urged to become prostitutes and molest children. As an adult, Berg's son Ricky was still so severely traumatized by his molestation that he murdered one of the women who abused him, then killed himself.
The Family has tried very hard to shake its horrific past and move on, but COG's international legacy of child abuse and cult manipulation won't be forgotten anytime soon.

It was probably the Oprah appearance that gave Marquis just enough temporary street cred to be invited on Geraldo Rivera's May 1989 show about the Matamoros killings, as a "former Satanic high priest". Though the Matamoros drug murders involved a cultish cartel that practiced a bizarre form of ritual sacrifice (mostly on enemies, but sometimes on random strangers), they had nothing to do with Satanism and even less to do with the Illuminati. Marquis also boasts of appearing or acting as a consultant for Unsolved Mysteries, Hard Copy, and Talk of the Town, but I can't confirm any of that. (1)

Around 1997 Marquis gave two epic lectures to the Prophecy Club, the same fundamentalist/conspiracy outfit that hosted Satanic Illuminati vampire Bill Schnoebelen.
He was introduced as a seventh-generation (reformed) witch raised in an Illuminati family. In one talk, titled "America's Occult Holidays", Marquis wasn't content to slam Halloween. He also tried to convince his Christian audience to stop celebrating Christmas, Easter, and Valentine's Day in traditional ways, because it's all Pagan-Satanic worship. (4)

These days, Marquis lingers on the conspiranoid fringe where he belongs. His videos and books are available online, and he was a presenter at this year's Conspiracy Con, but I doubt there'll be any more mainstream TV appearances.

John Todd Redux

Marquis claims he was a member of the U.S. branch of the Illuminati from a young age, but he can't seem to decide what that age was. On Oprah, he said he was 5 years old when someone sent a demon to control him. (2) In his Prophecy Club talks a decade later, he was 3 years old when it all began. (4) At any rate, his tender age handily absolves him of all personal responsibility for the atrocities he attributes to the group, placing him in the same redeemed-victim category as John Todd (who was an Illuminati member from birth).
The Illuminati Marquis describes is identical in most respects to John Todd's, being comprised of powerful "witches" who worship Satan, practice human sacrifice, and control basically everything. The Rothschild family is at the head of the Illuminati, just as John Todd said.

Born in 1956, Joseph was apparently not raised by his birth parents. It was a "foster aunt" who dedicated him to the Illuminati when he was just 3 or 5 years old. Presumably, it was she who sent a demon to him. His parents were kept out of the loop, and raised Joseph as a devout Catholic in Massachusetts. On Oprah, he said he even taught Sunday School, which (as fellow guest Whitley Strieber pointed out) would be odd - Catholic churches don't usually have Sunday school.

Marquis explained that his training began with earth religion (witchcraft). "Eventually, as I got to the higher levels, your philosophy is changed. You are now told what's really going on." (2)
He must have moved up to the higher levels of witchcraft very quickly, because in later accounts he says he was just 10 years old when he began attending an occult training academy known as the Outer Court, just like John Todd. There he learned the rudiments of human sacrifice, alchemy, and other dark arts.
Like everyone else in this series, Marquis views any form of occultism as devotion to Lucifer. Earth religion and Satanism and the Illuminati are all jumbled together into one huge, amorphous lump of evil. He claims that all Wiccans of "higher levels" knowingly worship the Devil, and you can't be in the Illuminati without pledging allegiance to Lucifer.

Artist's rendition of Doc Marquis's school

At 13 he was made a high priest of a Satanic Illuminati witch coven, just like John Todd. His initiation ceremony required him to slice his arm with an athame and sign The Book of the Dead in his own blood. This is what UK "black witches" Doreen Irvine and Audrey Harper supposedly had to do in the '60s, too, but they merely signed parchment. As we have seen, none of these worldwide Satanic cults use the same rituals, scriptures, or initiation rites. They can control the entire pop music industry, ritually slaughter hundreds of thousands of people every year without leaving a speck of evidence, and manipulate the whole geopolitical scene - but they just can't agree on a standard mode of worship. As Marquis and Irvine describe their cults, they operated like a Catholic church on Opposite Day: If a priest wears white, we'll wear black; if Catholics drink wine and pretend it's blood, we'll drink blood and pretend it's wine, etc. As you probably know, real Satanism is not merely an inversion of Christianity.
Marquis stated that Illuminists and all witches, in addition to worshiping Lucifer, pay homage to the Assyrian goddess Semiramis and the "god" Nimrod. I'm sure real witches would heartily disagree, but that doesn't stop David Icke and other professional conspiranoids from saying it continuously. Icke even insists the Statue of Liberty is an Illuminist representation of Semiramis (see page 8 of his Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster).
Nimrod is not exactly a god. He's an unruly descendant of Biblical patriarchs (Abraham, Noah) who supposedly reigned over various Mesopotamian cities. He may have been revered as a king of sorts, but the evidence for a cult of Nimrod is thin. It is mostly conspiracists like Alexander Hislop and Icke who conflate Nimrod with other deities and insist he was a consort of Semiramis, something mentioned only briefly by Josephus. This strain of thought seems to have begun with Hislop's 1853 tract The Two Babylons, or the Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife.
So this leaves only two possibilities: Either Marquis is lying about the Illuminati worshipping Nimrod and Semiramis, or the truth was found out by a cranky anti-Catholic dude who never left his native Scotland.
At any rate, Marquis doesn't go into much detail about Semiramis and Nimrod worship.

At 17 Marquis surpassed even Todd by becoming a "Master Witch" (a title Todd never mentioned). He ultimately attained the rank of Third Degree Master Witch, whatever that means. His superiors put him in charge of all the witches in three communities: Methuen and Lawrence in Massachusetts and Salem in New Hampshire.
After his formal witchcraft training was over he was ordered by his Illuminati superiors to join the Army as a medic, earning the nickname "Doc." This is a bit odd; Todd claimed Illuminati witches are exempt from military service. Marquis says he was part of the Illuminati plan to infiltrate every military base on the planet and recruit military brass (in the '80s, Christian conspiranoids were irate about Satanists being in the armed forces, with full Constitutional protection for their religious practices).

Marquis couldn't be bothered to come up with his own cast list for his Illuminati drama, so he just used Todd's: Prominent Wiccans Gavin and Yvonne Frost, Laurie Cabot and Raymond Buckland, plus Jimmy Carter's sister Ruth Carter Stapleton. Todd mistakenly claimed that Buckland had been an anthropology professor at Columbia, but Marquis moved him over to Harvard.
Later on, he added Sharon Tate, Charles Manson, and alien abductee Whitley Strieber to the Illuminati ranks. The Tate murders occurred, he said, because Sharon Tate expressed her intent to defect from the Illuminati. This is probably derived from a claim made by Wiccan Alex Sanders that he initiated Tate in the '60s, which has never been proven and was most likely (IMO) a PR gimmick.
Strieber earned Marquis's wrath by disputing his weird misinformation on Oprah (Strieber, though best-known as an alien abductee, appeared on the show only to discuss his novel Catmagic, which borrowed some ideas from Wicca).

One key difference between Todd's stories and Marquis's is that the latter's Illuminati Satanists congregate on a regular basis (Todd said they don't meet up at all, ever). According to Marquis, the Illuminati branches, and all the groups they control, perform human ritual sacrifices eight times per year. Marquis witnessed at least 100 human sacrifices during his time in the Illuminati. He talked about this on Oprah, explaining that the bodies of victims were left on roadsides or in wooded areas so that they would appear to be ordinary homicide victims. (2)

But the primary activity of the Illuminati is, of course, establishing a New World Order. In a hilarious illustration, Marquis identifies the elements of this hideous master plan to enslave mankind. They include Dungeons & Dragons, rock music, and "Sabbaths" (I think he means sabbats). All of the other ex-witches in this series warned about the evils of D&D, and Bill Schnoebelen even declared the game contained "real" spells that he gave to Gary Gygax in the late '70s (after the game was already created), but I believe Doc Marquis is the only former Satanist to actually elevate D&D to a central plank in the NWO agenda.

New Word Order enforcer Elfwood Dragonflail with his weapon of choice.

Conversion and Anti-occult Crusade

Like Mike Warnke, Marquis credits Christians in the military with saving his soul. After his three years in the service he realized his way of life was spiritually bankrupt, walked into a church, and was saved on April 15, 1979.
He immediately severed all ties to the Illuminati. So the Illuminati issued a half-million dollar contract on his life. Marquis claims that there have been eight attempts on his life. Never mind that he was making public appearances throughout the '80s and early '90s. The Illuminati can control the world, but it can't figure out how to assassinate one unarmed dude at a podium. I guess this means the Nation of Islam is better-organized than the Illuminati, which also failed to kill John Todd (who died of natural causes in a mental institution) and Mike Warnke (who's still alive). (4)

To fight the creeping menace of occultism, Marquis established the now-defunct National Occult Liberation Outreach Center and later an anti-occult ministry called Christians Exposing the Occult (also defunct). Since the early '90s he has published numerous books and tracts, notably several volumes of the "American Focus on Satanic Crime" series, written with Alan H. Peterson. He now heads Creation Message Ministries with Cory Black, gives interviews to internet radio shows (mainly conspiracy-themed ones), and appears at conspiracy conventions such as Conspiracy Con and Future Congress.

Just a few of the stupid statements made by Marquis:
- In 1990, there were up to 3 million witches in New England. (1)
- Freemasons are an integral part of the Illuminati, just as John Todd said, and are working to install a Masonic Antichrist.
- Kabbala is a "very Satanic counterfeit to the Torah and other Old Testament books of the Bible."
- Every "occult" organization, from Theosophy to Wicca, takes its orders from the Illuminati. And every single one must commit ritual human sacrifices eight times per year (on Oprah, he said only four of eight . The number of victims would be staggering. Marquis claims law enforcement and judicial authorities allied with the Illuminati help cover up these crimes - but if his numbers are accurate, there simply wouldn't be enough authorities to cover up so many murders. (4)
- Certain "Witch queens" as young as 13 are so powerful they are given control of entire states. An identical claim was made by John Todd, who said his sister was in charge of the state of Ohio at age 13. (1)
- They use astrology to figure out when Easter is going to be every year. (4)
- Satanists are active in the "white slavery" and drug trades. As with all his other claims, Marquis offers no examples and no evidence. (1)
- Aleister Crowley was a Freemason, more evidence that Masonry and Satanist are intertwined. Bill Schnoebelen said this in a Prophecy Club lecture, too. It's not strictly true. Crowley was into esoteric Freemasonry and claimed many degrees, but is not considered a bonafide Mason. (4)
- On Halloween, Druids painted pentagrams-within-circles in human blood on the doors of people who refused to offer up human sacrifices. The victims were herded to Stonehenge and ordered to stick their heads into a cauldron of boiling water. Only those who dared to do it were spared sacrifice, but of course they were left horribly burned. This is the tradition of bobbing for apples began. I would love to see his sources for this, because the first known mention of apple-bobbing dates to the eighteenth century. There is no indication that Druids did anything such thing. Apple trees weren't systematically cultivated in Britain until after the Roman invasion, and the Roman empire suppressed Druid practices, so it's unlikely that a new Druid tradition developed just as its other traditions were being eliminated. (4)
- The First Amendment is too lenient; neo-Pagan groups should not have tax-exempt status, and their members should not have the same Constitutional protection as Christians. (4)

You'll burn your face off, kid.

Like most former Satanists, Marquis spent a great deal of time attempting to explain the occult symbolism of such things as the 1992 Olympic cauldron (it was red because Rothschild means "red shield"), Christmas wreaths (Pagan-Satanic vaginas), and the dollar bill (hexagrams and pentacles).

Quit staring at it, you perv.

To give Marquis a small amount of credit, he didn't try to convince anyone that Lovecraft's Necronomicon is the central scripture of Satanism, or that soap operas are full of devil-worshiping gay men, as John Todd did.

Marquis also offered his services as an "occult crime expert" to law enforcement agencies, training officers how to investigate occult-related crimes or acting as a consultant. I don't know if any agencies hired him, but Marquis did obtain a letter of recommendation from Chief Norman Connors of the Allenstown, Pennsylvania police. Apparently at Marquis's request, Connors conducted an "extensive background" check on Marquis and found no evidence of illegal activity. This may have been good for his career as an occult crime consultant, but it certainly doesn't say much for his reputation as a badass Illuminati Satanist that police couldn't find a speck of criminal conduct in his background. (1)

Marquis drew in a few supporters, such as the late Ted Gunderson, Karen Kintella, (director of a Houston-based ritual abuse group called Valuable Information For Cult Traumatized Individuals And MPD Survivors, or VICTIMS), The Family International, Ken Adachi, and Pam Schuffert.

In 1999, Marquis privately published his autobiography, Memoirs of an Illuminati Witch.
He had learned a valuable lesson from the ex-Satanists who preceded him. He knew their testimonies were discredited largely because they could not (or would not) provide any verifiable information. He neatly skirted this problem by admitting, straight up, that he had absolutely no intention of giving us any evidence to support his stories. His memoir would be Christian testimony, and nothing else. Essentially, he said, "I'm not going to back up anything I have to say. Deal with it." He even admitted he was protecting the guilty, in order to prevent a Christian witch hunt. It seems his readiness to name names earlier in his career as an ex-witch hadn't paid off; it's much safer to offer up stories that are 100% free of falsifiable details. This will immediately get rid of any pesky nonbelievers who insist on stupid things like "facts" and "evidence", and ensure that the people who continue to support you will be the most gullible, malleable followers available.

Marquis still talks a lot about occult symbols hidden in plain sight, the Illuminati's New World Order plans, and Jesus. But his newest thing is predictions, or prophecies, involving conspiracies. He has ramped up the fear factor considerably. He says American concentration camps are being prepared for U.S. Christians, and claims to have been given a tour of one "death camp" in the Mojave desert. "As a former high level Illuminati planner for the New World Order, I was brought to the site of the future FEMA death camp in the Mojave. I knew exactly what it would be used for: the termination of Christian resisters of our 'PLAN' to seize this nation under martial law for our New World Order. My reaction when I stood within it's deadly confines when a Satanist? Sheer joy! I rejoiced over the thought of Christians being terminated in this place." That's interesting. FEMA didn't become active until after April 4, 1979 - about ten days before Doc left the Illuminati.
In May, on Stanley Monteith's radio show, he predicted that Obama may be assassinated by a Jewish person in 2012, and this would trigger an Islamic jihad against Israel because Obama is a closet Muslim. Boom, WWIII.

On August 20th, Marquis was a guest on Daniel Ott's online radio show The Edge. A bio posted on the show's website states Marquis trains mental health workers, FBI agents, and state and local police in recognizing and dealing with Satanic ritual abuse, Dissociative Identity Disorder and "programming/brainwashing" (he has no formal training in psychology). I can find no evidence that Marquis has given presentations to law enforcement or mental health professionals.

Marquis gave two presentations at this year's Future Congress in July, and both consisted of very tired material. One was about the occult symbolism hidden in the D.C. street plan, U.S. dollar bills, and the Great Seal of the United States. Yawn. In the other presentation, he examined the illustrations used in the Illuminati card game to "prove how they planned Y2K, 9/11, the British Petroleum oil spill of 2010, the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster of 2011, and other significant events years in advance".

I'm not even going to waste time explaining why Marquis's stories probably aren't true. Everything he says is recycled conspiranoid drivel. If he wants the world to take him seriously as a Luciferian Illuminati witch, he can start by coming up with one infintesimal speck of fresh information.

Sources:

1. Article on Joseph "Doc" Marquis by Kerr Cuhulain @ Witchvox
2. Unofficial transcript of Oprah June 24, 1987 broadcast
3. Xfamily.org entry for John Todd (Xfamily.org is run by former members of the Children of God/The Family International)
4. "America's Occult Holidays" Prophecy Club presentation by Doc Marquis (c. 1997)

Other "Former Satanists" of the '80s

2011-08-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

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The two men described below didn't have the same impact as Lauren Stratford or Audrey Harper, but they contributed to the anti-occult hysteria of the late '80s in their own corner of the world, Texas.

Ken McBride

Ken McBride's only notable appearance on the anti-occult scene was his central role in an obscure straight-to-video documentary produced in 1989, Dave Roever Presents: Exposing the Satanic Web.
Roever is a Texas preacher, so the video focuses heavily on alleged Satanic crime in Texas, while trying to convince us that Satanism is a nation-wide scourge. McBride estimates there are 40,000 Satanists in the Dallas-Fort Worth area alone, not including witches and pagans. By 1990 census numbers, that would be over 1% of the population.

McBride, and everyone else in the video, believes that the recruitment of young people into violent forms of Satanic worship is taking place everywhere. No teenager is safe. Not even toddlers are safe; several times, children's crayon drawings of "ritual abuse" are flashed on the screen while McBride or someone else relates anecdotes about Satanic crime.

McBride was supposedly in a Satanic cult from the late '60s until the mid '70s, for about seven years (between the ages of 21 and 28). He says he left Satanism fourteen years earlier (around 1975). He doesn't give us any specifics about this cult. He just says their rituals would terrify outsiders, because no Hollywood film has accurately portrayed the full horror of Satanism (which must have been news to "former Illuminati witch" John Todd, who said The Dunwich Horror was an accurate portrayal of Satanic witchcraft).
Ken and his fellow Satanists had powers that would make Captain America look like a 3-year-old with a water pistol. They could spontaneously start fires and kill people by uttering a single word.
He doesn't explicitly say this was witchcraft, but he does claim that just prior to a filming, a Wiccan told him he was afraid to leave the Craft because he feared the awesome power of the Satanists, implying that Wiccans and McBride's Firestarters are one and the same (which is news to me, because the Wiccans of my acquaintance have to use matches and lighters). Or perhaps he's implying that Satanists sit at the top of a religious pyramid, dominating earth religions that haven't mastered the art of magical murder. Whichever scenario he's laying out, it's bullshit. No Wiccan is afraid to leave Wicca because a Satanist might retaliate against him, because the two belief systems are not interlinked.

He tells us that politicians, police officers, lawyers and Christian ministers secretly practice Satanism. The police cult members cover up occult crimes.
All Satanists use drugs. McBride says he can barely recall his seven years of hideous devil worship, because he was drunk and/or stoned on Percodan and Valium most of the time.
And then he blurts out something truly chilling: "You're no longer dealing with human beings as you and I know them."

McBride informs us Satanic crimes are occurring all the time, and are bound to increase ("Matamoros was just the beginning," he says ominously). Unfortunately, those silly police detectives with their stoopit "forensic evidence" just don't know how to spot an occult crime when it's right under their faces. He gives the example of a murder victim who had "ZEN" written on her chest. "ZEN", he says, is a bastardization of the name of the powerful demon Zaden. The police would know that if they weren't so ignorant, if they would just put aside their little "crime scene analysis" for a damn minute and listen to people like Ken, who know what's really going on in the world. Today, we hear the same complaint from "occult crime experts" like Dawn Perlmutter.

The thing is, there is no demon called Zaden. Zaden was a deity of ancient Georgia, one of those abandoned religious figures that could have appeared on Mencken's list of forgotten gods. True, one culture's gods often become another's demons, but it's quite a stretch to assume that when a twentieth-century murderer writes "zen", he's harkening back to an Iron Age fertility god. He could just be referring to, I dunno, maybe zen? (Incidentally, I can't find any trace of an unsolved murder matching this description.)

So, to recap: Satanists are violent, drug-abusing, intimidating, immoral, corrupt, devious people who are barely even people. They can't be trusted at all. Unless, of course, they claim to be born again in Christ. Then you must heed every word they say, even if they admit their memory has been grievously impaired by heavy drug and alcohol abuse, or you'll be sorry. Your children will be sacrificing babies before you know it. All it takes is one heavy metal album, one Dungeons & Dragons session, one peace sign T-shirt...

Thankfully, McBride melted back into obscurity before Oprah or Geraldo caught wind of him.

Jerry Reider

Jerry Reider became known through an anti-occult organization called Exodus (not to be confused with the "ex-gay" ministry), which was founded in 1985 by San Antonio mother Yvonne Peterson. The group specialized in educating parents about the hazards of the occult, keeping teens away from Satanism and all its tentacles, and what Peterson referred to as "de-indoctrination" of Satanists. Exodus claimed that up to 60,000 Americans were being sacrificed to Satan every year, and presented testimony from several anonymous ritual abuse survivors who said they witnessed such sacrifices. Not one prosecution resulted from these anecdotal accounts.
Peterson makes a brief appearance in the video mentioned above, Dave Roever Presents: Exposing Satan's Web.

Jerry Reider performed the same function for Exodus that "former black witches" Doreen Irvine and Audrey Harper did for the UK organization Reachout Trust later in the '80s; he was the in-house reformed Satanist. As a two-for-one bonus, he was also a reformed heavy-metal musician who could warn kids away from Satanic rock.

Reider's story is fairly simple: Sometimes in the '70s, he got into Satanism via heavy metal. Then he married the high priestess of a Texas cult, who ritually sacrificed their infant daughter. And she got away with it, because Reider apparently never bothered to report this supposed crime.
Their cult (which Reider didn't name) lured teens into their clutches with - what else? - sex and rock music.

Not only did Reider have difficulty remembering his time as a Satanist (thanks to drug use), he couldn't even seem to remember his present. He claimed to be an ordained minister, but couldn't recall his denomination or who had ordained him.

The Prodigal Witch XI: Audrey Harper

2011-07-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

space

When Satanic panic spread to the UK, Audrey Harper become England's version of Lauren Stratford: A real, live "former Satanic witch" who could help the righteous root out other dangerous devil worshipers.

Insanity in the UK

In the '80s and '90s, a woman named Audrey Harper made many appearances on behalf of the Christian organization Reachout Trust, a major proponent of Satanic panic in the UK. She claimed that in the '60s, she belonged to a murderous Satanic cult in London. Her story was similar in theme to Doreen Irvine's 1973 book From Witchcraft to Christ, and that may not have been a coincidence; reportedly, Irvine and Harper were both converted to Christianity by the same evangelist, Eric Hutchings. (3) And both women, as living examples of "what Satanists do", were integral to the anti-occult crusade spearheaded by the late Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens, Diane Core of Childwatch, and Maureen Davies of Reachout Trust. (1)

Though it has the same basic structure and many common elements, Audrey Harper's story was much darker than Doreen Irvine's. While Irvine witnessed nothing more "deviant" than some bird murders and gay orgies in the early '60s, Audrey was party to child sacrifice and other extreme forms of brutality during the same time. It's odd that they didn't cross paths until becoming Christians, as they may have belonged to the same international "black witch" cult.
Their backgrounds were even eerily similar. Though Audrey had a more privileged life than Doreen (she was adopted by a doctor and his wife), hers was a loveless childhood. She fell into drug addiction and prostitution at a young age, and things only went downhill from there. Her boyfriend died, she gave up their baby for adoption, became an alcoholic. Homeless, she fell in with a gang of hippies in Picadilly Circus and became a chronic pill-popper and pot-smoker. (2)

Then everything changed. In 1961 Audrey was invited to a glamorous Chelsea party, because homeless hookers who reek of weed and booze get invited to these things all the time.
After the party, the beautiful people inducted her into a coven that met monthly in the upscale village of Virginia Water (where, ironically, some Harry Potter scenes have been filmed). On Halloween night she signed a parchment pledging herself to Satan (just like Irvine), and drank the blood of a sacrificed rooster (just like Irvine). Then she was sexually initiated on the temple altar by the cult's head "warlock" (the same term used by Irvine). This is the story she told to the London paper Sunday Sport in one of her first interviews (March 13, 1988). (4)

The "warlock" soon enlisted Audrey to recruit other vulnerable youths for the cult. The kids were gathered in a room scented by "heroin candles" and given hallucinogen-spiked drinks, which invariably led to orgies and the filming of porn. Ritual abuse and infant sacrifices were routine.
The cult also engaged in a range of petty crime, from church desecration to robbery.
Audrey remained with the cult for five years.
Like Irvine, Audrey never gave a name for her cult nor identified any of its members (at least, not publicly). She used the terms "witchcraft" and "Satanism" interchangeably, implying there is no distinction between earth religions and devil-worship. She was vague about her cult's religious beliefs. She didn't mention any scripture, like Irvin's massive Book of Satan, nor any rituals that didn't involve drugs, sex or murder. But she did describe the supernatural powers she developed, including the ability to levitate and the very handy skill of occult furniture arrangement: "I could bring down the powers of darkness to move furniture about". (2)
Irvine had developed the same skills during her years as a "black witch". Sadly, everyone forgot to take pictures.

Drug-addicted and mistreated by cult members, Audrey ended up in and out of mental hospitals, where she gave birth to her second child. She gave up this baby for adoption as well, fearing the head warlock would sacrifice it. (2)
Her addictions, combined with personal intervention by the Devil himself, served to keep Audrey tied to the cult. "Satan could direct me to the coven by remote control," she later explained. "There was no resistance. I had to go." Even after leaving the cult, she continued to believe that all her self-harming actions and poor choices had been the direct result of Satanic interference. Every time she injected an overdose of heroin, or walked to a cemetery where babies would be slain and women raped on altars, it was all the Devil's idea. This near-total abdication of personal responsibility is so common to the testimonies of "former Satanists" that it begins to wear very thin after you've heard a few of them. It's hard to believe that even the most hopelessly drug-addicted, beaten-down person would passively watch gruesome atrocities committed under her nose month after month, year after year, without making any effort to extricate herself from the situation. (2)

Of course, because this is first and foremost a Christian testimony, it was God and His people who provided Audrey with a way out of Satanic slavery; she finally resolved to leave the cult after a stint in a Christian rehab centre in 1966. Her escape was effected without any repercussions, just as Irvine's departure from the black witches had been. Somehow, though she was not yet born again, her telepathic link with Satan was weakened.

Audrey married, had a third child, and attended church regularly. But she was consumed by guilt and rage until 1986, when she was exorcised by Roy Davies of Emmanuel Pentacostal Church in Stourpart. Freed from the demonic aftereffects of witchcraft, she was finally born again (Doreen Irvine, too, was exorcised after leaving her witch cult).
In 1988, Audrey decided to go public with her story.

How Audrey's Story Was (Mis)Used

Geoffrey Dickens latched on to Audrey Harper immediately, supporting her and helping her spread the news that, to her knowledge, English Satanists were still sacrificing children. Dickens was one of two Tory MPs (the other being David Wilshire) engaged in anti-occult agitation during the late '80s. Wilshire actually called for witchcraft laws to be re-instated, and Dickens campaigned for occult literature to be restricted or banned. Complaining that "perverted cults which worship the devil can freely publish guides on how to dabble in the occult," he opined, "The Home Office must act." (1) He worked closely with Childwatch, a Hull-based organization that used every opportunity to warn the public about Satanic ritual abuse in England. Its founder, Diane Core, declared that up to 4000 English children were being sacrificed by Satanists annually. She publicly aired bizarre stories from alleged SRA survivors, like the "breeder" who claimed her cult froze sacrificed babies so members could defrost and eat them later.
Wilshire declared in the House of Commons that Satanism 'is about the ritual mutilation and torture of people, particularly children." (1)

Audrey Harper fit right into this crusade. Along with SRA survivor Cassandra "Sam" Hoyer, she gave numerous interviews and became a darling of the tabloid media. Both women were aided and abetted by Dickens, Wilshire, Core, and Davies of Reachout Trust, all of whom politely ignored the glaring inconsistencies in Ms. Hoyer's various accounts. (1)

Police looked into the possibility that Harper's baby-killing cult was still active, but Audrey gave them so little to go on that the investigation was soon dropped. If her story had seemed credible to law enforcement, it's quite possible that Audrey herself would have been charged in connection with infant murders. This aiding and abetting is a very peculiar feature of ex-Satanist testimony, and it's one that gets overlooked by many Christians. Few people have pointed out that Mike Warnke (if his story had been true) should have been charged with abduction and rape, that Lauren Stratford could have been prosecuted for allowing her three children to be killed by her associates, or that Doreen Park deserved jail time for sexually exploiting her children. It's bizarre that the people who tried to flush out occult criminals embraced self-described occult criminals when they encountered them, instead of demanding they be prosecuted. These "whistleblowers" were simply re-classified as victims and enlisted in the fight. But being a whistleblower does not absolve you of participation in awful deeds.
Fortunately, not one of these "whistleblowers" was telling the truth.
In spite of a years-long crusade against Satanic crime, no evidence of the mass murder of children by Satanists ever surfaced. The entire campaign was based on anecdotes, recovered memories, and uncorroborated stories from "former Satanists" and "ritual abuse survivors".

Harper did a significant amount of work for this campaign. Alongside Irvine, she joined the Investigation Committee of the Evangelical Alliance, dedicating to compiling evidence of ritual abuse and other occult-related crime. (3) She appeared on the talkshow After Dark in April '88, to confront neo-Pagans about their evil ways. (6) She met with a parent involved in the Nottingham case to discuss ritual abuse. She collected the testimony of other "survivors" of Satanism to share with her audiences, including stories from coven "breeders" (women forced to give birth to babies specifically for ritual sacrifice). No criminal charges resulted from the sharing of these stories, because Harper did not know (or did not reveal) the full names of the alleged victims. (2)

The UK effort was closely aligned with the one going on in the U.S. For example, Harper, David Wilshire, Doreen Irvine, and Maureen Davies appeared in Caryl Matrisciana's documentary Devil Worship: The Rise of Satanism. You may recall that Matrisciana was one of the people who encouraged "Lauren Stratford" to write her 1988 memoir of violent Satanism, Satan's Underground.

Was any part of Audrey Harper's Story True?

Aside from the magical furniture-arranging and whatnot, there's nothing in Harper's story that couldn't have happened. It is, of course, entirely possible (but not likely) that a kooky band of "witches" and "warlocks" were conducting some weird ceremonies in Virginia Water during the very early '60s and that Audrey participated in them. But her accounts of Satanic crime don't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. For one thing, she couldn't bring forth a single person to corroborate any part of her story. She claimed that her life as a Satanist was so secretive, no one outside the cult was even aware of her involvement.
For another thing, her story changed dramatically during the first two years of her public appearances. Undoubtedly, the changes stemmed from her involvement with a group of activists who were desperately trying to convince the world of the reality of Satanic ritual abuse. Audrey's original stories, told to tabloid reporters, didn't contain much of that. By late '80s standards, her Irvine-inspired material was bland and unhelpful. If she wanted to retain the interest and support of her allies, she had to offer up some "evidence" that would aid their campaign. So that's exactly what she did.
In 1990, Harper and reporter Harold Pugh published her story of redemption from Satanism, Dance with the Devil: A Young Woman's Struggle to Escape the Coven's Curse. Suddenly, the sacrificed rooster used in her initiation ceremony was a sacrificed infant. Geoffrey Dickens, who wrote a foreword for the book, must have noticed the discrepancy. Perhaps, as Reachout would later do, he convinced himself that Audrey had simply been misquoted in the tabloid press. Some inept yellow journalist must have scribbled "cockerel" in his notes when he meant to write "baby". Happens all the time.

As recently as 2005, Reachout Trust republished Harper's book and continued to defend its integrity. They claim that two members, Doug Harris and Mike Thomas, have investigated Audrey's story and concluded she has been truthful. It's possible that Harper believed her own stories, but it's the truth, not "honesty", that is at issue in Satanic horror stories like Audrey's. A perfectly sincere person can declare that tens of thousands of people are being slaughtered by devil worshipers every year, without having a single fact to support that statement. Doreen Irvine, who comes across as earnest and sincere in her presentations, was diagnosed as having schizophrenia.
It is our responsibility to learn if such statements have any factual basis before even repeating them, much less demanding action from legislators, citizens, and clergy (as Reachout, Childwatch et al did in the '80s and '90s)
Reachout now states it does "not support the myth of SRA [Satanic ritual abuse]." Evidently, its members learned some hard lessons after the hysteria Reachout helped create destroyed lives, careers, and families throughout the UK.
Nonetheless, the organization still offers Dance with the Devil for sale on its website, at a significantly reduced price, along with Jeff Harshbarger's memoir of Satanism.

Harper herself has apparently moved on.

Notes:

1. For more information on the UK anti-occult crusade, see this timeline . The UK crusade has also been extensively documented by the Sub-Culture Alternatives Freedom Foundation (SAFF)
2. Dance with the Devil by Audrey Harper and Harold Pugh (Kingsway Publications, 1990)
3. "Satan in Suburbia" by Gareth J. Medway. Fortean Times. Nov. 2001. ,
4. Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism (New York University Press, 2001)
5. "Christian Authors" (part 5) by Kerr Cuhulain. Witchvox.com. Retrieved July 29/11.
6. "The Devil Rides In: Charismatic Christians and the Depiction of a Satanic Menace in Contemporary Great Britain" by Philip Jenkins. Religiologiques. Spring 1995.

The Prodigal Witch X: Derry Mainwaring Knight

2011-07-24T01:08:00.000-07:00

God's 007

In the spring of 1983, an unassuming, middle-aged fellow by the lofty name of Derry Mainwaring Knight appeared in Newick, East Sussex, and began attending the local Anglican church, St. Mary's. He became a regular at Bible studies and prayer meetings. He offered to hand out Christian tracts.
He told the late vicar, John Baker, that he had been born again in jail (he had just been released from Hull Prison after serving time for a rape conviction). His sincerity and eagerness to devote himself to his newfound faith must have touched Reverend Baker deeply, because he did everything in his power to help the ex-con. When Knight said he was homeless, Baker gave him a room in the rectory attic, rent-free. When Knight said he was desperately short of cash, Baker promptly raised over £6000 to put toward the newcomer's debts.

St. Mary's Church in Newick

That's when Knight began to show symptoms of demonic possession, lapsing into strange trances and talking about the Devil.
During one such spell, he revealed to Baker that he was the grandson of a sorceress who groomed him from childhood to be a great Satanic leader. When he was just eight years old, Granny informed Derry he could enter into communion with the Devil himself if special platinum plates were surgically implanted in his skull. The plates were installed, and just as Granny promised, Derry was able to communicate directly with Satan. As an adult, he become a high-ranking member of a secretive but powerful cult.
When he came out of his altered state, Baker repeated all this to Knight and asked him if it was true. Yes, Knight admitted, it was. For years, he had been struggling to break free from a Satanic cabal that operated at the the highest levels of English society.

The son of a pastor, Knight had been raised in Germany. Lucifer manifested in his bedroom one night to claim him when he was nine, he told Baker.

Now, Derry claimed, he wanted to destroy his own devil-worshiping sect from within. He wanted to rid himself of demonic possession. He wanted to pay off his debts to cult members, so they could no longer hold sway over him. He wanted to bring other Satanists out of occult slavery. He wanted to destroy unholy Satanic regalia. To do all that, though, he would need funds. Major funds.
Over the next several months, members of St. Mary's Church and other area residents donated a staggering sum (over £300,000) to Knight's anti-Satanic crusade. The county high sheriff gave over £83,000 pounds. The wife of millionaire Tory MP Timothy Sainsbury ponied up nearly £120,000 pounds. Anthony David Brand, Lord Hampden contributed a Rolls-Royce with state-of-the-art communications equipment so that Knight could continue to pose as an affluent Satanist-about-town. The bishop of Lewes wrote a letter on Derry's behalf, requesting donations for his "necessary work". In November 1983, Reverend Baker secured a £25,000 loan from a Christian charity and handed it over to Knight.

Lady Susan Sainsbury, one of Knight's prominent victims

Where did all this money go? Knight claimed to be buying up Satanic paraphernalia such as talismans and robes, expressly to destroy them in dramatic ceremonies. He explained that some of these items were being used to magically influence him, keeping him tied to Satan; the objects would send "signals" to the plates in his head. Oddly, no one suggested he simply get the plates removed.
On one memorable occasion, Knight flung a golden scepter into the Thames. Another time, he and the Reverend Baker carried a silver chalice into the church garden and crushed it.
At the time of his arrest in 1985, Baker was in the process of raising £20,000 so Knight could acquire a "Satanic throne" from a lavish temple in Pall Mall.
The members of St. Mary's didn't get to see a lot for their money, but they treasured the satisfaction of knowing they were literally buying a man's way out hell. Like shareholders, they held regular meetings so they could be briefed on Knight's progress.

No one in the Newick congregation was aware that Knight had just been sprung from prison after a rape conviction. Nor that he had prior convictions for fraud and robbery. Nor that he was an out-of-work housepainter in spite of his cult's supposed affluence.
Clearly, he was still in Satan's grip and needed all the help they could give him. Sometimes he would collapse to the ground in a deep trance, muttering Satanic incantations.

The first person to hear serious alarm bells in his head was the Bishop of Chichester, the late Eric Kemp. The septuagenarian bishop caught wind in the summer of 1985 that congregants in Newick were throwing fat sums of money at a Satanic double agent, and didn't think it sounded quite right. The double-agent thing was sensible enough, he thought, but the donations seemed excessive.
The alarm bells turned to sirens when Derry himself told Kemp he had been initiated into Satanism by a defrocked Catholic cardinal. As Bishop Kemp knew, no English cardinals had been defrocked in the '50s.
Kemp believed the Charismatic movement, which was popular among certain Anglicans at that time, rendered Christians vulnerable to this sort of deception. They focused on the ubiquity of evil until they convinced themselves that things like mind-control scepters and telepathic head-plates could really exist. They also convinced themselves that God was speaking directly to them, exhorting them to help scammers like Knight in His name.

A church investigation, conducted by a retired bishop, uncovered Knight's police record, and Newick authorities were notified. Inspector Terrance Fallon concluded he was dealing with your typical con man - Derry was just luckier than the usual crook, having stumbled onto a community of kind-hearted and extraordinarily gullible people with scads of money. The donations had gone straight into Knight's own pocketbook, usually manifesting as gifts for "lady friends", high-end car rentals for himself, and posh parties. On one occasion, he chartered a champagne steamboat cruise along the Thames for one hundred guests. The Anglicans were not invited.

Knight, under Inspector Fallon's questioning, played the innocent. Sure, he had asked the vicar for some cash to pay down a debt, and chatted with him about black magic and Satanism because Baker was "interested in that sort of thing". But he never asked for another handout, he insisted. The Anglicans were so keen to squash Satanic evildoing in their area that they plied him with fistfuls of money every time he showed up for a prayer meeting, begging him to do something about the occult menace. (1)

As it turned out, Knight had a colourful history of scamming Christians out of their money. He had been dishonorably discharged from the Coldstream Guards for defrauding a fellow out of thousands of marks.

When the Anglicans of Newick learned about Knight's real past, and his Larry Flynt present, most of them wisely faced the fact they had been scammed. Many of them testified against Derry at his 1986 trial. So did local jewelers who had been hired by Derry to craft peculiar-looking scepters and medallions out of gold and silver.
Church member Randle Mainwaring (no relation) testified that Knight once proposed sexually blackmailing a local bank manager to raise funds for his anti-Satanism campaign.

But others stubbornly maintained that Derry had been doing God's work, and should never have been arrested. Michael Warren, who lost £36,000 pounds to this "work", vociferously defended Derry from the witness stand and warned the court that Satanism was "very much a potent source of evil in this country". (2)
Reverend Baker, too, remained certain that Knight's life was imperiled by devil-worshipers. On the witness stand, he refused to name the items he and Derry had destroyed, for fear he and others would be "shot or disposed of in some way" by cult leaders for revealing details of their ritual implements. (2)

Though Knight admitted to Inspector Fallon that he wasn't a Satanist, just the recipient of something like compulsive philanthropy, his trial defence strategy was to declare himself a member of a cult called "The Sons of Lucifer" and bring out shocking testimony that would blow the lid off Satanic doings at the highest levels of English society. He "outed" two Tory politicians (William Whitelaw, Enoch Powell) and one Labour MP (Leopold Abse) as cult members.
He declared he would have no need to bilk money out of churchgoers, because he was a successful pimp.
Derry Mainwaring Knight was convicted of nineteen counts of obtaining money by deception and sentenced to seven years in prison by Judge Neil Denison. He also received a £75,000 fine.
After his conviction, his own mother claimed he had conned her out of a large sum of cash.

Knight's Legacy

Reachout Trust, a UK organization dedicated to fighting the occult, listed Derry Mainwaring Knight's story as evidence that ritual abuse was really occurring in England in the '80s, and with Reverend Kevin Logan produced a tape titled Set Free in Christ. In the video, a woman identified as Peggy Knight claimed she was Derry's mother and a born again Christian. She said the cult Derry betrayed still posed a serious threat to the entire family.
Logan also included the Knight story in his 1988 book Paganism and the Occult, though he obscured the names and details. In this book, Logan stated that every city and major town in the UK contains a "small exclusive coven made up mostly of people in the professions." (3)
Logan was heavily involved in UK Satanic panic; one of his most tragic Satanic ritual abuse misadventures is described in my post on Doreen Irvine. We'll see Logan and Reachout Trust again in the next part of this series, dealing with "former Satanist" Audrey Harper.

Today, professional conspiranoid David Icke still considers Derry Mainwaring Knight a valuable Satanic whistleblower: "Willie Whitelaw, a chairman of the Conservative Part, was named as a leading Satanist by self-confessed Satanist, Derry Mainwaring Knight, at Maidstone Crown Court in 1986. As usual, nothing was done about it. Mainwaring-Knight lived near East Grinstead, one of the centres of Satanism in England." (4)

Is it possible that Derry Mainwaring Knight really did practice Satanism with high-level politicians, when he wasn't scamming churchgoers? No. The fact that he had to manufacture Satanic paraphernalia in order to destroy it indicates he didn't have access to any real stuff. At one point he claimed to be a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult organization, but this wasn't verified. That's probably why he chose not to mention the OTO at his trial. There is no known Satanic group called Sons of Lucifer, and no grand Satanic temple exists in Pall Mall. "Nothing was done" about his courtroom accusations against Whitelaw simply because no one, barring a country vicar and a few Charismatic believers, found his tales remotely credible.

Due to the prominence of Knight's victims and the sheer wackiness of his scam, the outcome of his trial was covered by all the major English daily newspapers. The affair should have staunched the spread of Satanic panic in the UK, but sadly it did not. Stories of former Satanists and ritual abuse survivors, which were every bit as spurious as Knight's Sons of Lucifer nonsense, continued to flow through the media like a diseased river, polluting minds and sweeping innocent people into whirlpools of persecution.

Sources

1. The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism by Gareth J. Medway (New York University Press, 2001)

2. "A British Con Man Says the Devil Made Him Do It" by Dianna Waggoner. People magazine. Vol. 25. No. 24 (July 16, 1986)
3. Paganism and the Occult by Kevin Logan (Kingsway Publications, 1988)
4. The Biggest Secret by David Icke (2nd edition; David Icke Books, 1990)

The Prodigal Witch IX: Lauren Stratford Part III

2011-07-20T17:40:00.000-07:00

continued from Part II

Out of the Frying Pan, Into Another Frying Pan

In the summer of 1997 a new face appeared at a support group called the Child Holocaust Survivors Group of Los Angeles. Laura Grabowski didn't share much about her background at first (she was even reluctant to identify her country of origin, Poland). She said she had kept her past a secret from everyone throughout her life and was fearful of revealing it, but over several months she told members of the group a few stories about her time as a child inmate of Auschwitz.
Her parents died during the war, so after Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, 5-year-old Laura was sent to an orphanage in Krakow. In 1950 she was adopted by a couple from Washington state.
Soon, Laura was so close to her fellow survivors that she referred to them as her new family. (1)

There were many gaps in Laura's story. She never gave her birth name or the names of her parents, never explained how she came to be adopted by foreigners, never spoke of her other family members. She did, however, describe the experiments at Auschwitz in some detail. She could remember the doctors giving the children candy. She remembered Mengele injecting chemicals into her eyes, rendering her temporarily blind. She remembered the procedure that left her unable to bear children. (1)

There was nothing in Laura's story that indicated falsehood up to this point. Roughly 3000 Polish children and teens were incarcerated at Auschwitz, and 52 of the liberated inmates were children under the age of 8. (4) Mengele did attempt to change the colour of the iris by injecting dyes into children's eyes, and experimented with sterilization.
But Laura's Mengele stories were problematic. His subjects were mostly children with disabilities or unusual traits, and very few of them were allowed to live. As the above numbers show, most of the Polish children were murdered or died of disease. (5)

There were other not-so-subtle hints that Laura's story was fabricated. She posted this to an online Holocaust survivor forum called H-HOLOCAUST: "For myself, the Holocaust is about individual suffering... And if some call themselves survivors who are not survivors in any sense of the word, does this upset the whole survivor movement? I think not." (1)

Meanwhile, historian Jennifer Rosenberg set up an About.com page to share her Holocaust research. Shortly before she traveled to Auschwitz in 1998, she was contacted by Laura, a frequent visitor to the site who used the screen name Child Survivor. She asked Rosenberg to place a pair of pink sandals at the death camp to commemorate her friend Ana, a little girl who died there.
Rosenberg did so, and said Kaddish for Ana and others. As she wrote on her website, the tiny shoes were a poignant reminder of how young and innocent some of the victims had been, bringing the darkness of Auschwitz into sharp relief for her and other members of her tour group. (3)

Laura befriended another frequent visitor to Rosenberg's website, Monika Muggli, and the two began an e-mail correspondence. Laura told Muggli she was desperately ill with a rare blood disorder. While she still could, she wanted to travel to Los Angeles in April 1998 to meet Binjamin Wilkomirski, a fellow child survivor of Auschwitz whose widely-acclaimed memoir, Fragments, had been published in 1995. (3)
Wilkomirski, born in 1941, had been just two or three years old when he entered the camps. His memories of that time were repressed until he entered psychotherapy as a middle-aged adult and began "recovering". The memories he recovered were fragmentary and mysterious, so he wrote his memoir from the perspective of a young, confused child. Tanks became "big gray monsters", and the inmates' uniforms became pajamas. (2)
Laura and Wilkomirski had been corresponding since the previous year, and could recall meeting each other in Auschwitz and in a Krakow orphanage.
Their experiences had been stunningly similar. They were the same age. They had both been adopted by Christians after the war, and raised away from their countries of origin. They had both been victims of Mengele, and both suffered blood diseases they believed to be caused by the medical experiments. Binjamin could vividly recall Laura's white-blonde hair (their heads had not been shaved, leading Binjamin to conclude they were probably unregistered inmates). They compared notes and realized they both had their coccyx bones broken by the camp doctors. They had so much to share.
Sadly, Laura's California doctors said she must fly first-class to make sure she received the attention her fragile condition required, and she simply couldn't afford the airfare to L.A.
Muggli promptly sent $1000 to her American friend. (3)

Bruno Grosjean, AKA Binjamin Wilkomirski

The meeting between two child survivors drew international media attention. The BBC recorded a concert held at a Beverly Hills synagogue on April 19 (Holocaust Remembrance Day), in which Mr. Wilkomirski played his clarinet and Laura Grabowski sang an original piece, "Ode to the Little Ones". Incredibly, though they had met only briefly 50 years earlier, Binjamin recognized Laura on sight. He movingly described how he was sitting disconsolately in the mud, believing himself to be the last child in the camp, when white-haired Laura and her little friend Ana appeared hand-in-hand.
Laura admitted she didn't remember Binjamin right away, but eventually realized he was the boy known as "Andrzej". She told the BBC, "He's my Binje, that's all I know."
A local Jewish newspaper noted that Wilkomirski was helping his long-lost friend reconstruct her half-remembered childhood memories, her own "fragments". (3)

Exposed, Again

Somehow, Jon Trott or the Passantinos learned that Laura Grabowski could be Laurel Willson/Lauren Stratford. This was quickly confirmed. Documents signed by Grabowski included Laurel's Social Security number and address, and in one letter Laura signed her name "Laura Stratford-Grabowski". As mentioned in Part I of this post, Grabowski was the maiden name of Laurel's mother, Rose Willson. Anton and Rosalio Grabowski emigrated from Poland in the 1890s. They were lifelong Catholics.
The three writers also compared signatures of Laura and Laurel, finding them nearly identical. Photos of Laura showed a distinct resemblance to old photos and film footage of Lauren Stratford.
The Cornerstone team learned that Stratford/Grabowski had applied to the World Jewish Restitution Organization. An anonymous source told them that in '98 and '99 Jewish Family Services made 24 disbursements to Grabowski, totaling $2,188. (1)

Laurel Willson was born in St. Joseph's Hospital in Tacoma, Washington in 1941, and the Willsons began adoption proceedings within days of her birth. She did not live in Poland until the age of 10. In fact, she had never left the U.S. at all. The entire story was a fantasy. Family photos provided to the Cornerstone researchers by Laurel's sister, Willow, show Willow and Laurel together as little girls. In one photo, they pose with a group of nuns.
In her books, Lauren/Laurel said she was abused from the age of four by her mother, Satanists, pedophiles, and child pornographers. She gave detailed descriptions of her life in Washington before the age of 10, descriptions that evangelistic Christians like Johanna Michaelsen and Hal Lindsey found highly convincing. Those stories were not true, and the Holocaust stories of "Laura Grabowski" were not true.

The Holocaust survivor community that had become Laura's family didn't know how to respond to the revelation that she was a Gentile who had never lived abroad. Jen Rosenberg told Forward magazine she didn't want to deal with the issue at all. (3)

And what of Laura's long-lost friend from Auschwitz, Binjamin? As you may know, he was also a fraud. In August 1998, the Swiss news magazine Weltwoche published an article by writer Daniel Ganzfried, laying out evidence that Wilkomirski was really a Swiss Gentile by the name of Bruno Grosjean. Grosjean had remained in Switzerland throughout the war, and was never in a Polish orphanage. His father was not killed in Latvia. He never knew his father. His mother did not die in the camps. (2)
Wilkomirski initially responded to the allegations by explaining he had been given the name of a Christian boy, Bruno, after the war. This satisfied many of his admirers. (2)
However, Ganzfried's findings were confirmed a year later by Stefan Machler, the historian hired by Wilkomirski's literary agency. He uncovered still more damning information: When Yvonne Grosjean died in 1981, Bruno contested her will because he knew he was her illegitimate child.
More damning still was Bruno's "recognition" of Laura Grabowski, a woman who had never been in Auschwitz.

DNA tests conducted in 2002 showed that Bruno Grosjean's biological mother, Yvonne, and "Wilkomirski" were indeed mother and son. There is absolutely no question that "Binjamin" the Latvian Holocaust survivor was really Bruno Grosjean, born 1941 in Switzerland and adopted by the Dössekker family of Zurich in 1948. (3)

It is quite obvious that Laurel Willson mined Fragments for information about the Holocaust. She placed herself in a Krakow orphanage, just like Wilkomirski.

Of the two hoaxes perpetrated by Laurel Willson, this one was probably more damaging. Though short-lived in relation to her Satanic cult hoax, it defrauded at least one organization that could have been assisting a real Holocaust survivor. And like other Holocaust memoir hoaxes, it has been used by Holocaust deniers to argue that all such memoirs are fictional.

The stories of Lauren Stratford and Binjamin Wilkomirski were known to be "recovered memories". While there are indications that traumatic memories can sometimes be forgotten and spontaneously recalled, this would seem to be an exception to the rule; most memories of traumatic events are consciously recalled. For this reason alone, those eager to promote their stories should have verified them to the greatest possible extent before making them public.

This entire sad affair mirrors the meeting between Eugenia Smith, a woman who pretended to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, and Mikhail Goleniewsky, a man who pretended to be the Tsarevtch Alexei. The two "siblings" instantly recognized each other. Later, as their credibility eroded, both denounced the other as a fraud.

The End of the Underground

Lauren Stratford never publicly responded to the exposure of her Holocaust imposture. Nor did she recant any of her Satanic testimony, though the two overlapping accounts wildly contradicted each other. No evidence ever surfaced to validate either version of her life story, so her former supporters quietly backed away from Satan's Underground.
None of the people who helped promote Lauren's story have expressed regret for failing to verify even the most basic details before presenting her terrifying tales to the public.

Lauren Stratford passed away in California in April 2002. To my knowledge, she remained estranged from her adoptive family to the end of her life.

It is now generally accepted that the woman known as Laurel Willson, Lauren Stratford, and Laura Grabowski confabulated her stories of Satanism and Holocaust survival. There are only a few diehards who insist Satan's Underground was factual, like Satanic ritual abuse survivor Gregory Reid. As late as 2002, Reid defended the veracity of Lauren's account and hinted that the Cornerstone writers were complicit in a cover-up of the "real" story. He brought no evidence to the table.

Examing how and why Satan's Underground came to be, and why it affected so many people, offers us invaluable lessons about critical thinking. If only Joanna Michealsen, Hal Lindsey, Pat Robertson, Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera, and the other SRA advocates of the late '80s had learned them...

Sources:

1. "Lauren Stratford: From Satanic Ritual Abuse to Jewish Holocaust Survivor" by Bob and Gretchen Passantino and Jon Trott. Cornerstone magazine. Vol. 28, Issue 117 (October 1999).
2. The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth by Stefan Machler (Random House, 2001)
3. A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski by Blake Eskin (W.W. Norton, 2002)
4. The "Children in Auschwitz" page of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum website
5. Mengele: The Complete Story by Gerald Posner and John Ware (McGraw-Hill, 1986)

The Prodigal Witch IX: Lauren Stratford Part II

2011-07-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

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continued from Part I

Unearthing the Underground

In 1989, Christian authors Bob and Gretchen Passantino teamed up with Jon Trott, one of the Cornerstone magazine writers who would expose Mike Warnke's deceptions in 1991, to investigate the story told in Satan's Underground. They had been alerted to possible problems with Lauren Stratford's testimony by another Cornerstone researcher, Eric Pement. A colleague expressed doubts about Stratford's credibility to Pement after he booked Lauren as a speaker at the Rockford Conference on Discernment and Evangelism. (2)
The Passantinos were extremely skeptical of Satanic ritual abuse stories, and realized that Christian writers played a role in fomenting the hysteria.

As with Warnke's The Satan Seller, nearly everything in Satan's Underground turned out to be at odds with the facts. First of all, "Lauren Stratford" was really Laurel Willson. Secondly, the chronology was wonky. Willson was born in 1941 (as I guessed, she grew up in Washington state), so if her timeline is accurate she ran away from her adoptive mother in 1956, met Victor in 1959, and left Victor's cult when her father died in 1960.

Trott and the Passantinos learned that Laurel's adoptive father, physician Frank Willson, left the family when Laurel was nine years old, not when she was four. He died in 1965. This means Laurel was twenty-four years old, not twenty, at the time of his death. And Laurel lived with both her adoptive mother and father at various times after the age of fifteen.

This timeline, which makes Laurel Willson a good deal older than Lauren was when she was supposedly a virtual hostage of Victor's Satanic porn empire, undermines the impression given in Satan's Underground that Lauren was a dewy innocent during her year as a Satanist. She would actually have been in her mid-twenties and out of college.
Lauren had gone to great lengths to prove to us she was never a Satanist by choice, that everything she did was done under duress. This would be easier to believe of a 19-year-old who had never lived away from home.

More surprising was the fact that Laurel had a sister, Willow. Though Lauren didn't explicitly state she had no siblings, she strongly implied she was totally alone with her deranged mother after her father left the family. This was not the case. Laurel and Willow often visited their maternal grandfather, Anton Grabowski, in Tacoma. (4)

And what of Lauren's adoptive mother? Was she really a demented, violent, raging harpy who allowed homeless drunks to rape four-year-old Laurel? Did she really invite child porn film crews to set up shop in her basement? Did she beat Laurel and abuse Frank so viciously he ended up in hospital on several occasions?

Rose Willson was a schoolteacher. In 1941, the year they began adoption proceedings for Laurel, she and Frank lived in the town of Buckley, Washington, not far from Tacoma. Willow was five years old.
The Willsons were older parents. Frank Willson, born around 1899, earned his medical degree from Loyola University in 1926.
According to Willow, the Willsons were devout members of the local Bible Presbyterian Church, and raised their daughters in a "very sheltered, strict Christian" environment. Both had volatile tempers and argued frequently, but Willow says their anger was not directed at her or Laurel.
Willow described Rose Willson as straightlaced. In her opinion, her mother would never have become involved with child pornography. (3)
At any rate, it would have been very difficult for a middle-class Tacoma woman to do in the early '40s. It's very unlikely Rose Willson herself had been a victim of child pornographers, having grown up in pre-WWI Tacoma.

Willow's and Laurel's upbringing was completely average for small-town kids in the '40s. They made trips to the beach, played in local parks, and rode their bikes around the neighborhood. The Willsons fostered Laurel's musical talent by paying for lessons in voice and various instruments. As a teen, Laurel was part of a singing trio and belonged to several school clubs. (3)
Recall that in Satan's Underground, Laurel claimed she was deprived of toys, outings, and extracurricular activities throughout her childhood.

In short, Willow noticed nothing out of the ordinary in the Willson household. She was a Christian missionary in 1989, so she was probably not just covering up her family's alleged Satanic porn activities. (2)

Other parts of Lauren' story were at least partially true. Laurel did run away from home (around the age of sixteen), and was sent to live with Frank at his new home in San Bernardino, California. However, she didn't stay there long. She returned voluntarily to her mother's home in Tacoma. This fully contradicts Lauren's claim that she escaped her mother's nightmarish household and never looked back. (3)

Interestingly, there have been many rumours of Satanic cult activity in and around San Bernardino. It was at San Bernardino Valley College, Mike Warnke claimed, that he was recruited into the violent Satanic sect known as The Brotherhood.
Crackpot "mind control researcher and deprogrammer" Fritz Springmeier (who got out of prison last year after serving seven years for his role in an armed robbery) states in his nonsensical article about the "McDonald bloodline" that San Bernardino is a "major headquarters for the Illuminati and Satanic Hubs", with thousands of black magic practitioners residing in the area. Springmeier is a major purveyor of misinformation about the occult. He claims to have deprogrammed an Illuminati slave called Cisco Wheeler, and together they authored several books about Illuminati mind control. He vociferously defended "former Illuminati member" John Todd after Todd's stories were shown to be fraudulent.
In addition to the nonsense of Warnke and Springmeier, Devil Canyon in San Bernardino has supposedly been the site of Satanic rituals involving animal mutilation. But these stories weren't circulating when Laurel lived in the area. The rumours reportedly began in 1981, after the Kimberly Crest mansion in Redlands was used in the filming of the slasher flick Hell Night.

For a time, 17-year-old Laurel lived with Willow's family in Seattle. This is when signs of severe emotional problems began to surface. She accused Willow's husband of sexually molesting her, the first of many sex abuse allegations she would make. In 1959, shortly after enrolling at Seattle Pacific College (a Christian school now called Seattle Pacific University), Laurel told a classmate she had been forced into prostitution by her mother and molested by staff members. According to Willow, Laurel admitted to the dean that she had fabricated these stories to "impress" her friend. Shortly after this incident, she made her first suicide attempt by cutting her wrists. (3)
By the Satan's Underground timeline, Lauren was in California, hopelessly addicted to pills and under the control of the pornographer Tony and his minions.

Laurel's condition seemed to improve when she returned to San Bernardino and enrolled as a music major at the University of Redlands (then a Baptist school that required daily chapel attendance). She became the choir director at a First Assembly of God church. On the surface her life was back on track, but she told friends her father was molesting her, and made numerous suicide attempts over the next six years.
In 1962, she attached herself to an older Christian couple and moved in with them. Seeking sympathy and stability in the homes of others would become a lifelong pattern for Laurel. This eerily parallels the behaviour of "serial teenager" Treva Throneberry, who attached herself to Christian families and falsely accused several men of sexually abusing her. Treva, too, told horrific tales of Satanic ritual abuse.

Laurel lived with Norman and Billie Gordon for nearly a year, and required far more attention than their children. She told them her mother had died when she was very young, and her stepmother abused her physically and sexually. On one occasion she showed up at the Gordons' home with a bruised forehead, claiming her stepmom had bashed her with a can of peaches. Under questioning, she admitted it was a lie.
She experienced periods of hysterical blindness that she later admitted were fake - which sheds some light on the episode of blindness recounted in Satan's Underground (supposedly experienced on the day she ran away from home). She engaged in self-mutilation.
The Gordons washed their hands of Laurel after she lunged at Billie with a broken vase. (3)

Laurel returned to live with her father and attended another First Assembly of God church. She told a friend that two lesbians in the congregation had seduced her. It's highly unlikely that even one lesbian would attend a Pentacostal church.
Despite her emotional turmoil, Laurel earned her bachelor's degree in music from the University of Redlands in 1964. Then she left home without telling anyone where she was going, and pretended to be a drug addict to gain entrance to an L.A. rehab program called Teen Challenge (she was twenty-three at the time).
After her father's death in 1965, Laurel lived on her own and held down a job as a music teacher at Hemet Junior High School. In '66 she married a younger man, a minister's son, after three or four dates. The marriage was annulled two months later. (3)
None of these events are mentioned in Satan's Underground.

In January 1968 Laurel left Hemet Junior High. She later told people she worked as a guard or a counselor at the California Institute for Women in Chino from 1969 to 1971, but there is no record of her employment there. If she did work at the Institute, it was her last job outside the home.
During this period, Laurel sang with a gospel trio called Delpha and the Witnesses. In '71, she lived for a time with the family of group member Ken Sanders in Bakersfield, and she remained in Bakersfield for the rest of her life. She told Sanders and Delpha Nichols that her mother and several men had sexually abused her "in the name of Christ." This abuse had been so brutal that she doubted she could bear children, she told them. She didn't mention Satanism or Satanic ritual abuse at all until the '80s, after the publication of Michelle Remembers.
Nichols and her husband, Willie, were so touched by this damaged woman that they legally adopted Laurel when she was thirty years old. But she continued to seek support from others. To a church friend, she related stories of abuse that the woman later realized were drawn from the book Sybil. Clearly, Stratford was familiar with Multiple Personality Disorder long before she was diagnosed as having it, and was not above passing off others' suffering as her own. (3)

By now, Laurel's mental instability was obvious to everyone who knew her. It prevented her from working outside her home (she gave private piano lessons and drew mental disability payments), singing with a group (Delpha and the Witnesses split in '74), or maintaining relationships. She put such tremendous demands on one close friend's time that the woman began to feel alienated from her family, and attempted suicide. Laurel deliberately estranged herself from her mother and Willow in the late '70s, telling them she had a new family. (3)

Enter Satanic Panic: Bakersfield and McMartin

It was California's pedophile ring hysteria and daycare ritual abuse allegations that led Laurel on a circuitous route to Johanna Michaelsen and Hal Lindsey, the people who would make her story famous. Without her marginal involvement in two infamous cases, Lauren may never have met them at all and her bizarre stories would never have been believed.

Unfortunately, by sheer chance, Laurel happened to live in a city in which sex-abuse hysteria and Satanic panic would establish a firm grip in the mid-'80s. It all began in 1982, when 38-year-old Mary Ann Barbour learned that one of her husband's granddaughters, 7-year-old Becky McCuan, may have been touched inappropriately by a family member. Barbour was furious that the alleged abuse hadn't been reported to the authorities (though Becky had undergone therapy, and visits with the family member were supervised). She decided the McCuans were unfit to parent their two daughters or to continue running a daycare centre in their home. Questioning her stepdaughters closely, she "discovered" they were abused not just by one relative, but by a huge group of local pedophiles - including their own parents. The Barbours were granted custody of the two girls.
The investigation mushroomed into a literal witch hunt. For the next three years, children were aggressively interrogated until they "revealed" horrific abuse that included torture, murder, child pornography, and Satanic rituals. Many of these children later recanted their testimony, and 34 of the 36 convictions in the case were overturned on appeal, but the damage has been permanent for some families. Alvin and Debbi McCuan, for instance, weren't released from prison until 1996, and remain estranged from their daughters to this day. (5)

Laurel contacted a foster parent involved in the Bakersfield case, Pat Thornton, to say she feared for her life because she had inside information about the perpetrators - Satanic cultists.
Laurel fell into her usual pattern with Thornton. She called her at all hours with emotional crises, demanding attention. She said she had been a "love slave" to a Satanist named Jonathan for many years. Jonathan belonged to a huge Satanic pedophile/pornography ring involved in the Bakersfield abuse. It was headed by man known as Elliot.
Laurel had been an unwilling cult member her entire life, as both of her parents had been members. She was sexually abused by both of them. Her youth had been spent in a farmhouse basement. She had lost more than one child to human sacrifice. The first, Joey, died when she was fifteen, and she said she still possessed an audio recording of his death. For two years, she had been confined to a Los Angeles warehouse along with other cult breeders.
Laurel was enrolled in high school and living with her mother and sister at age fifteen. According to Willow and others who knew her during that time, she was never pregnant.
Laurel told Thornton she began to resist the cult after her father died in 1983. She wanted to leave the cult and expose it, but Jonathan and Elliot continued to force her to attend late-night ceremonies that included ritualistic sexual abuse of preschoolers. This was ongoing in 1985, yet in her book Laurel would say she left Satanism over two decades earlier. (3)

If Laurel could meet privately with individuals involved in a high-profile child abuse investigation, what prevented her from leaving the cult? Surely, if Jonathan and Elliot allowed her enough freedom to associate with "the enemy" on numerous occasions without any interference, she had enough freedom to slip out of the area?

Laurel also claimed to have inside information about the McMartin preschool case; members of her cult were involved in that, too. She said she had a lesbian affair with one of the accused, Virginia McMartin. No evidence has ever emerged to indicate that the elderly Mrs. McMartin, who died at the age of eighty-eight in 1995, was a lesbian.
Pat Thornton didn't believe Laurel really had inside information. Nonetheless, she arranged for her to meet with a private investigator working for some of the McMartin parents, Judy Hanson. Laurel appeared for the meeting in a wheelchair, carting an oxygen tank. She told Hanson she was terminally ill. Again, this speaks against the notion that Satanists were forcing her to attend rituals. Would Jonathan and his fellow cultists really haul Laurel's wheelchair and medical equipment to and from remote sites just so she could be witness to their abuse of children? Even if this was happening, couldn't she seek shelter in a hospice (or impose herself on strangers, as she so frequently did)?
McMartin parent Bob Currie video-recorded Laurel's testimony and shared it with several other McMartin parents. They all agreed her story was not credible, and could end up damaging their case. All of the details she offered were either unverifiable or had already been made public in media reports. The district attorney, Colleen Ryan, reached the same conclusion.
It was Currie who provided Johanna Michaelsen's contact information to Laurel, at Laurel's request. (3)

Virginia McMartin during her trial

As mentioned in my thumbnail sketch of Johanna Michaelsen, Michaelsen was aware of the contents of Laurel's McMartin-related testimony before Satan's Underground was published. She admitted to the Cornerstone writers that she didn't know if it was true or not. (3)
This is a damning admission, because the McMartin testimony flatly contradicts Laurel's later testimony, having a completely different timeline and very different details. In this earlier account, Satanism had always been part of Laurel's life and she was still active in it during the mid-'80s. Why would Michaelsen overlook these inconsistencies and uncritically accept Laurel's later stories? Why would her brother-in-law lie about having documentation? Why would Harvest House publish such a disturbing memoir without securing any evidence that it was, in fact, a memoir? According to Cornerstone, the publisher received nothing more than character references from people who hadn't know Laurel very long. No one from Harvest House contacted Laurel's family to confirm even the most basic information. (3)

If Laurel really possessed all the evidence she claimed to have, and if her stories were accurate, prosecutions probably would have resulted. "Victor" or "Jonathan" could have been tracked down. Rose Willson, who was still alive, would surely have been investigated for possible involvement in a child pornography ring. Laurel could have led police to the other women who were forced to be breeders for the cult. Law enforcement would have been keenly interested in everything she had to say.
Laurel tried to persuade her supporters that this was, indeed, the case. She told them she had given the specifics of her case to Justice Department official John Rabun, and that Rabun was one of her advisors on Satan's Underground. As it turned out, Rabun worked not for the government, but for the National Center for Missing Exploited Children. He told the Cornerstone researchers he had spoken to Laurel Willson only once, over the phone. Just like the Bakersfield investigators and the McMartin parents, he didn't find her story believable. (3)
This episode demonstrates that Laurel Willson was not merely delusional, but on at least some occasions engaged in deliberate deception in order to make her fictional stories seem credible.

There are also indications that Laurel attempted to erase the contradictory stories she had told. After her book was released, she legally changed her named to Lauren Stratford. She asked Bob Currie to give her the videotapes of her McMartin testimony. She stopped communicating with Pat Thornton. (3)
The name change, the physical distance and estrangement from her family, and her cutting of ties with certain people helped ensure no one would uncover her true background. But the Cornerstone article documented Laurel's real life so thoroughly that Harvest House yanked her book from publication (it was subsequently reprinted by another publisher).

Her speaking engagements dwindled in the early '90s, forcing her into bankruptcy in 1994. (3)
Eyewitness accounts of Satanic evildoing were no longer novel or shocking; Lauren had a lot of competition. Also, skeptics of the whole phenomenon were beginning to be heard in the media. The 1992 BBC Panorama program on which Lauren appeared, In the Name of Satan, had a distinctly critical tone, to her annoyance. This same program, which is not to be confused with the cheesy video documentary of the same name by evangelist Bob Larson, also documented the mental abuse Pastor Doug Riggs was inflicting on his parishioners. The tide had turned.
When Satanic panic finally subsided in the U.S., Lauren Stratford altered her name and background once again. This time, she became a Holocaust survivor.

Part III: Out of the Frying Pan, Into Another Frying Pan

Sources:

1. Satan's Underground by Lauren Stratford (Harvest House, 1988)
2. "Lauren Stratford Update" by Jon Trott. Cornerstone magazine vol. 18, issue 91. 1990.
3. "Satan's Sideshow" by Bob and Gretchen Passantino and Jon Trott. Cornerstone magazine. 1989.
4. "Lauren Stratford: From Satanic Ritual Abuse to Holocaust Survivor" by Bob and Gretchen Passantino and Jon Trott. Cornerstone magazine
5. Dateline NBC report by Keith Morrison. Broadcast October 22, 2004.

The Prodigal Witch IX: Lauren Stratford

2011-07-02T19:42:00.000-07:00

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"Lauren Stratford" on Geraldo's 1988 TV special Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground

The late '80s were the golden age of Satanic panic, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the woman known as Lauren Stratford launched that panic to a whole new level.

How Lauren's Story Emerged

The key part of Stratford's saga began in 1987, when she contacted Christian author Johanna Michaelsen claiming to be a California counselor who had recently recovered repressed memories of her involvement in child pornography and violent Satanism. The trauma associated with these memories had so undone her that she could no longer take care of herself, and the sex abuse support group she ran wasn't providing her with the healing she needed. Worse, she was being stalked and menaced by associates of a Satanic porno kingpin named Victor.
Stratford said she had seen Michaelsen on TV a year and a half earlier, talking about devil worship, and immediately knew that Michaelsen was the solution to her problems.
Johanna and Randolph Michaelsen were not the kind of people to turn away a Christian sister in need. Incredibly, they welcomed this troubled woman into their home and nursed her like a child for a month, praying with her and comforting her when she woke screaming from nightmares. Lauren believed she was under attack by the Devil. She could actually hear the growling of demons and the shrieks of dying babies. She felt invisible hands throttling her.
Lauren later wrote, "In Mike Warnke's book The Satan Seller you can read of similar activities. He describes how evil spirits actually do physical harm to people." (1)

The Michaelsens introduced Stratford to reporter Ken Wooden, who had become something of an expert not only on the exploitation of children, but on the hidden world of devil worship (or so he thought). Johanna sought his advice on how to counsel Lauren.
This was not Wooden's first brush with Satanic ritual abuse. In 1985 he provided research for 20/20's report on Satanism (The Devil Worshippers), and that same year was consulted by investigators of a ritual abuse case in El Paso (the Michelle Noble/Gayle Stickler Dove case).
Wooden was primed to accept a tale of Satanic evil, and Stratford's confirmed his worst suspicions about the extent of Satanic subversion in America. Without verifying any of her claims, he encouraged her to write her memoirs. He said going public was the best way to scare off the Satanists. Johanna seconded the idea. Michaelsen's sister Kim and Kim's husband, Hal Lindsey, were also extremely supportive. Michaelsen and Wooden joined Lauren on Hal's Christian TV show to share her full story for the first time. Lindsey addressed a warning directly to the Satanists who wanted to silence Lauren, telling them he possessed documentation of Lauren's allegations. Johanna later admitted Lindsey was "bluffing".

After his work with Lauren Stratford, Wooden stepped up his campaign against ritual abuse. In November 1988 he wrote a letter to the New York Times titled "Light Must Be Shed on Devil Worship". He mailed pointers on how to prosecute ritual abuse cases to 3500 U.S. prosecutors.

Lauren was also strongly encouraged to tell her story by Christian author Stormie Omartion (a fellow survivor of childhood abuse), filmmaker Caryl Matrisciana, and radio host Joyce Landorf Heatherley.
These evangelical Christians (some of international reputation) were deeply concerned about the effects of Satanic ritual abuse and occult crime, on both the spiritual and temporal levels. Their hearts were mostly in the right places, but they could have benefited enormously from a little skepticism and a touch of research. They were endorsing a story that had no basis in fact.

Lauren's Story: Different, yet identical

Recovered memories of Satanic ritual abuse first surfaced in the book Michelle Remembers, published in 1980. Though none of the incidents recalled by Michelle Pazder could be corroborated, and several had definitely not occurred (for instance, the murder and dismemberment of her imaginary friend), this book offered the first hint that large clusters of Satanists were engaged in well-organized, deeply depraved criminal activities as early as the 1950s. Perhaps the book's most unsettling revelation was that these Satanists were not dwelling on the fringes of society; they were middle-class urban professionals who masqueraded as Christians by day and tortured their children in the name of Satan by night.
Within two years of its publication, full-scale Satanic panic had erupted in parts of the U.S., with daycare providers and parents of young children standing trial for unimaginable crimes. In part two of this post, we'll see how this hysteria provided a blueprint for the construction of Stratford's personal Satanic mythology.

Stratford's 1988 memoir, Satan's Underground, picked up where Michelle Remembers left off. While Pazder experienced Satanism only in childhood, Stratford had lived most of her life in the subterranean world of porn, devil worship, and drug abuse. She could describe the atrocities of Satanism in far more detail than Michelle Pazder, making her memoir a more potent tool in the fight against the Devil's disciples.
The book was successful for this and a few other key reasons: It was put out by a major Christian publisher (Harvest House), it contained an introduction by Johanna Michaelsen (as well as endorsements from well-known Christians like Mike Warnke and Hal Lindsey), and it offered compelling Christian testimony. Thanks to Lauren's ridiculously broad definition of Satanism, it could even be used to denounce any non-Christian religion: "the worship of anything or anyone other than Christ is ultimately the worship of Satan", she wrote on page 186.

It also had a fatal flaw. While the Pazders made some effort to ground Michelle's recovered memories in reality (including dates and locations where possible), Satan's Underground suffers the same deficit we've seen in most of the other ex-Satanist/witch stories: An almost total absence of verifiable details. And this was not an accident. Ms. Stratford had very good reasons for obscuring her past.

Lauren is only the third person in this series supposedly introduced to Satanism in early childhood (she initally claimed she entered Satanism around the age of 19, then later recovered memories of being ritually abused in childhood). The others claimed they were drawn to it during late adolescence, usually in the liberal atmosphere of college campuses. In this respect, her testimony bleeds into the Satanic ritual abuse stories of the late '80s, with Stratford portraying herself as an innocent overcome by archetypal evil. More than any other ex-Satanist testimony we've seen so far, hers brings to mind the anti-Catholic tales of Gothic horror related by "former nuns" like Maria Monk and Charlotte Keckler, in which priests behave like rutting animals and mothers superior pitch aborted babies into cellar lime pits. Her story is lurid and surreal, yet also carefully crafted to yank the reader's heartstrings.

There are at least two highly significant firsts in Satan's Underground. Stratford was the first former Satanist to claim status as a "breeder", forced to bear children for ritual sacrifice. The concept was introduced by Michelle Remembers. It's no coincidence that within months of the release of Satan's Underground, breeders were popping out of the woodwork to appear on Geraldo and Sally Jesse Raphael.
Stratford was also the first former Satanist to present testimony consisting largely of recovered memories (Michelle Pazder, as mentioned, was never actually a Satanist, and breeder Jacqui Balodis claimed she was a Satanist only because she was born into a devil-worshiping family).
Still later, Stratford became the only ex-Satanist to alter her story in order to pose as a Holocaust survivor.

As you read, note the many similarities among the testimonies of "witch queen" Doreen Irvine, "high priest" Mike Warnke, and Lauren Stratford:

- a childhood full of abuse, exploitation, and deprivation
- an early introduction to Christ that paves the way for salvation later in life
- an absence of time markers
- lack of detail about the beliefs of Satanists (scripture, philosophy, etc.), but extraneous detail about the practices of Satanists (sacrifice, crime, etc.)
- Helplessness. Rather than choosing to live a life of Satanic evil, the protagonist is a vulnerable innocent lured or coerced into sin by more worldly people. Drugs play a huge role.
- supernatural events and paranormal abilities
- complete redemption, healing, and forgiveness through Christ
- expert advice on how to avoid the snares of the occult

Into the Underground

Satan's Underground opens with a fragmented yet graphic account of a young child - Lauren - being raped.

After this scene, readers may feel disoriented, as there are few solid details to ground us in reality: No time, no place, no context. We learn only that Lauren was adopted either privately or on the black market, and that when she was about four years old her adoptive mother began paying for household services by allowing homeless men to rape Lauren. We are given the impression that life was normal for Lauren up to this time; she depended on her mom, was well cared for, and felt safe. After the rapes, life changed. Lauren's mother became physically and verbally abusive towards her daughter and her husband, landing the latter in hospital several times. He left the family when Lauren was four.

Though we aren't given many clues as to when or where these events occurred, Lauren seemed to be in her mid to late forties in her TV appearances of the late '80s, indicating the abuse began in the '40s.
A reference to the rainy season suggests Lauren's mother may have lived in the Pacific Northwest, while subtle clues indicate her father relocated to California.

"On the surface," Lauren writes, "I could not have had a more perfect home." Both adoptive parents were upper-class professionals. They attended church regularly, which provided Lauren with the foundation for her faith. But Lauren's life consisted mostly of abuse and chores. She had no siblings, no toys, no friends, and no free time. Negative associations related to her birth and heritage were drummed into her, with her mother forcing her to stand before mirrors and repeat that she was a bastard, a "no good", a "bad blood". Though Mother occasionally showed guilt and Christian devotion, she attempted to separate Lauren from God by telling her "Jesus don't want no dirty, filthy little kid." The language is hardly what you would expect from an educated, upper-class woman, indicating that Mother had a working-class background, if not a split personality. She would launch into unprovoked rages, screaming hysterically as she hurled things around the house.

The abuse escalated when Lauren was ten. After she threatened to run away, Mother handed her over to two men who photographed her naked with farm animals. Several months later, Lauren found a child porn magazine in Mother's room that contained these photos. The same two child pornographers soon began photographing and filming Lauren and other children being raped by homeless men.

Lauren balked at reporting her mother to the authorities, fearing she would be murdered before they could intervene. As a teenager she confided in two pastors, a school counselor, and police officers, but all of them advised her to tolerate the abuse until she was old enough to leave home.
Then, at fifteen, she ran away and was placed in the custody of her father in another state. Mother harangued him with phone calls until he grudgingly agreed to let child pornographers continue exploiting Lauren. She was regularly taken from her dad's home to an office in an upscale business district, injected with a stupefying drug, and abused in front of the camera. She became addicted to the pills the boss, Tony, gave to her.
We never learn how Mother, a socially isolated, middle-class woman with no apparent substance abuse problems, was introduced to the world of extreme child pornography, nor why Lauren's father would tolerate the situation.

Lauren continued to appear in hardcore porn after enrolling in college. She explains she continued because of low self-esteem, drug addiction, and fears of sexual blackmail. Not even cradling the wasted body of a 15-year-old prostitute as she died of a drug overdose could send Lauren packing. She didn't realize there was an even more sinister power behind it all.

This section of the book attempts to link child abuse to mainstream porn, citing the hysterical misinformation of Dr. Judith Reisman and the fact that "10% of all men who serve on school boards read Playboy". Once the taste for mainstream porn wears off, Stratford tells us, "the flames are fanned into an ever-increasing abnormal, uncontrollable craving for perversions that end in abuse, torture, animalistic behavior... and sex with children." (69) This was a popular view among Christian conservatives in the '80s, but even then it contradicted everything known about sexual orientation. In this undated clip, Judith Reisman discusses the foundation of the '80s anti-porn movement: Dr. James Dobson's interview of Ted Bundy. The anti-porn crowd actually believed that if Bundy had never been exposed to girlie mags in the '60s, he wouldn't have developed into a sadistic sociopath (frankly, I've always wondered if Bundy was messing with Dobson's head for one last sick thrill).

Victor

One day the pornographers shoved 19-year-old Lauren into a van, blindfolded her, and drove her out of the city to a gorgeous ranch, the legendary "House of Victor". Victor was in charge of the porn operation, and Lauren came to suspect he ran a national child porn empire that had been keeping close tabs on her since childhood.
Victor was a slimeball out of central casting, with slicked-back hair and slabs of gold jewelry. He complimented Lauren's porn performances and bragged about providing "first-class service for high society here at my estate", a not-so-subtle hint that powerful forces are involved in Satan's underground. He offered Lauren the opportunity to become "his woman" if she serviced his clients adequately. Lauren hated the industry, was repulsed by Victor, and didn't want the assignment. But she believed if she refused, she would be hunted down and killed. So she let herself be taken to Victor's ranch on a regular basis and abused in a cottage outfitted as a sex club, with fetish and torture rooms. His clients included doctors, lawyers, CEOS, judges, politicians, entertainers, clergy, and cops (after taking cocaine, these guys talked a lot).

Lauren knew that children as young as ten were at the ranch, and that some were being killed for snuff films, yet still wouldn't go to the police. Keep in mind that she was living at her father's house and attending college throughout this time. Her excuses are getting thin and contradictory.

At some point within the next year, Victor grew dissatisfied with regular debauchery and turned to Satanism. In a later book, Stripped Naked, Lauren describes recovered memories of being abused and mentally manipulated by Satanists in her childhood, so it's quite bizarre that Victor stumbled onto the same ideas all on his own.
He became a high priest and set up a ritual chamber in the basement of the ranch house. Lauren, as his woman, was forced to attend ceremonies at which black-robed strangers summoned spirits, drank urine- and blood-laced wine, cursed their enemies, and engaged in human sacrifice and cannibalism. She was raped by several men atop the altar, and consecrated to the Devil. Victor filmed some of this activity and sold the footage to doctors, lawyers, and high-level politicians.
Watching demonic entities materialize at rituals, Lauren concluded that demons can physically harm people if cultists demand it. This added another layer of threat to her supposedly walled-in existence.

It is at this point that Lauren, for the first time, directly addresses skeptics. She writes that it must be difficult for us to believe infant sacrifices are a regular occurrence in today's America, and we're probably wondering where all these children are obtained. She would have the same questions had she not witnessed such sacrifices, she assures us. After describing several particularly cruel and gruesome sacrifices, she gets to the point: "If you do not believe, you have played right into their hands, and they have accomplished their purpose." (96)
In other words: You're with us, or you're with the Satanists.

In chapter six, Lauren further attempts to explain her compliance by likening herself to a POW who has been brainwashed. To bolster the argument, she again brings in Judith Reisman, who personally told Lauren that brainwashing had psychologically paralyzed her from a young age.
Lauren mentions this because she's about to describe her own participation in an infant sacrifice.

Because she refused to voluntarily make a sacrifice to Satan as Victor demanded, he employed a man named John to break her will. John locked her in the basement, deprived her of food and sleep, and trapped her in a box with dozens of snakes (a scene nearly identical to one in Michelle Remembers). This torture regime seems to centre around the misconception that occultists require their victims' consent in order for their magic to work.
Finally, John told Lauren that for every week she held out, a baby would be sacrificed in her name. She held out for at least three more weeks. Not until John caged her in a barrel with the corpses of three infants did she relent.

The entirety of chapter seven is devoted to the sacrifice, held on Halloween ("one of the most important dates on the Satanic calendar - THE CELEBRATION OF DEATH!"). It was performed in a Christian church. To overcome her extreme reluctance to stab the cloth-shrouded baby, Lauren imagined she was attacking all the people who had ever abused her.
Afterwards, the cultists trooped to a cemetery nestled in a ravine, dug a shallow grave beneath a tree, and placed the still-shrouded infant in it. Lest you think Lauren is finally giving us some verifiable details, however, she adds that bodies of sacrificial victims were always disinterred and cremated; burials were of ritual significance only.

The Satanic sect Lauren describes bears very little resemblance to Warnke's Brotherhood, John Todd's Satanic Illuminati, or any of the other imaginary cults we've seen so far. Lauren's Satanists don't seem as interested in world domination as they are in torturing children, placing curses on enemies, and enriching themselves. They are the antithesis of everything Christian. While Jesus loves the little children, the Satanists eat the little children. While Christians gather in sun-filled churches, Satanists congregate in basements and cemeteries in the dead of night. While Christians pray to God for healing and peace, Satanists summon demons to cause anguish and pain. Again, this aligns Satan's Underground more with ritual abuse stories than with other ex-Satanist testimonies. Stratford doesn't mention Victor's cult having any scripture, organized rituals, or specific beliefs.

Lauren's not-so-daring escape

Lauren's father, a workaholic she seldom saw, died when she was twenty. "There was no reason for me to stay put. I immediately packed up and moved to another city." You read that correctly. Lauren had been free to leave at any time. In fact, there were few repercussions. Victor left her alone, aside from an occasional phone threat to ensure her silence.
Lauren must now produce some other lame excuse for her failure to report the countless rapes, murders, and torture sessions she had witnessed. This comes in the form of a demonic spirit guide, a deceptively kind entity that appeared to her in ghostlike form and called itself Mother. Every time she thought about going to the police or a therapist with her story, Mother stopped her.

Lauren took a series of professional jobs involving the counseling of troubled people (yikes), but her life was far from settled. She moved continuously to evade Victor's phone harassment, if that makes any sense. She suffered a chronic, life-threatening illness as a result of abuse (in her 1993 book Stripped Naked, she claimed to have a rare blood-clotting disorder, which isn't likely to have been caused by abuse). Stress and illness landed her in hospital over forty times in an eight-year period.
For pain management, she began guided imagery sessions with a social worker. She experienced violent abreactions during some of these sessions, and suppressed memories of the abuse she suffered in childhood began to surface. Journaling aided the memory retrieval process. I should note that guided imagery therapy and journaling are mentioned frequently in the recovered memory stories of the '80s, along with abreactions and "body memories".
Her progress was slow and difficult, thanks to the harangues of "Mother" and her unnamed condition, which rendered her unable to work. One bizarre episode of uncontrollable shaking and gibberish-talking landed her in hospital. A doctor told her a pain medication had triggered a memory so traumatic Lauren couldn't express it in English.

In therapy, Lauren recovered memories of having three children (Joey, Carly, and Lindy) during her time with Victor. Carly and Lindy were killed in snuff films, and Joey was burned to death on a Satanic altar. Leaving aside the question of how a woman could forget three pregnancies, how did Lauren bear three children between the ages of nineteen (when she met Victor) and twenty (when she left him)? This is never addressed in Satan's Underground.
We are told that "occult murder authority" Dr. Al Carlisle learned from a Satanic Black Prince that 40,000-60,000 Americans are sacrificed every year. This number was frequently cited by Satanic panic purveyors in the '80s and early '90s, though it was flatly contradicted by missing persons statistics. Its original source has never been identified
Lauren tells us we must face that face that babies, children, and teens are being killed in snuff films and Satanic rituals. "I beg you: Don't let Joey's life be for nothing."

It was at this point in her struggle, around 1985, that Lauren saw Johanna Michealsen on TV. Though she hesitated to contact her for fear Michaelsen would go to the police, her TV appearances gave Lauren the courage to begin speaking out against child abuse and porn and to form a support group for victims of sexual abuse. This group caught the attention of Christian radio host and author Joyce Landorf Heatherley, who invited Lauren to be an anonymous guest on her show several times. Lauren told the listeners that therapy can't heal you, only Jesus can.
She now had the attention, admiration, and unconditional support of numerous women. People were turning to her for guidance. Finally, eighteen months after first seeing her on TV, Lauren had the strength to contact Johanna Michaelsen.

After spending seven hours listening to Lauren's stories, the Michaelsens decided to take her into their home. We aren't told if this was their idea or Lauren's, but we'll see that moving in with strangers was already a well-established pattern for Lauren.
Along with Ken Wooden and and the Lindseys, the Michaelsens nursed her through a three-week spiritual battle similar to Jesus' forty days in the wilderness. Lauren emerged triumphant in Christ and healthier than she had ever been. This part of the book, in contrast to the claustrophobic gloom of the first thirteen chapters, is life-affirming and inspiring.

Chapter fourteen of Satan's Underground consists of expert advice on how to avoid becoming a victim of Satanic deception. If you've read the other stories in this series, every item on Stratford's list will be familiar to you: Don't play Dungeons and Dragons ("where evil is a dominant theme"), don't listen to heavy metal music, avoid Ouiija boards and all forms of divination, etc. Weirdly, though, Stratford also warns us against guided imagery, the very process that allowed her to recover her memories of Satanic abuse in the first place. This is probably because of Johanna Michaelsen's negative experiences with "occult" visualization techniques.

The fifteenth chapter details the spread of Satanic violence. Every case Stratford mentions is either a hoax or an instance of Satanic panic: the Pico Rivera and Bakersfield "pedophile rings", Henry Lee Lucas's imaginary Hand of Death cult, the W.I.C.C.A. letter, the allegations of Dr. Walter Grote of West Point (who would appear on Geraldo's Satanism special with Lauren). Given Stratford's involvement in the Bakersfield debacle, which we'll examine in Part II, it's surprising she states the district attorney "dropped the case in a plea bargain." In reality, thirty-six people were convicted.

In the penultimate chapter, Stratford gives advice to parents of ritually abused children. Some of the advice is sound if applied to any form of abuse (report the abuse, seek therapy, maintain your child's normal routine to the greatest extent possible), but her thoughts on ritual abuse are extremely weird and clearly tailored for the Patriot conspiracy crowd. For instance, she warns that in addition to undermining God and family, ritual abusers may destroy a child's patriotism. The abusers might molest children with miniature U.S. flags, or dress up in military uniforms "to increase the child's association of patriotism with ugliness." The former notion later popped up in the absurd stories of "MK-ULTRA survivor" Cathy O'Brien, who claims she recovered memories of atrocious abuse at the hands of U.S. presidents, country music stars, and holographic lizards.

How Satan's Underground Was Used

Most books by former Satanists, like Warnke's The Satan Seller or Irvine's From Witchcraft to Christ, functioned primarily as Christian testimonies that highlighted the dangers of the occult. But Satan's Underground served two additional purposes:

1. It provided "evidence" that Satanic ritual abuse was occurring on a vast scale. Children's Institute International (a primary player in the McMartin daycare debacle) recommended the book as a resource on child abuse. "Cult cop" Larry Jones promoted the book via his Cult Crime Impact Network (CCIN) and at least one issue of its File 18 newsletter. Stratford gave a presentation at CCIN's ritualistic crime seminar in Boise, Idaho on October 25, 1988.
2. To a lesser extent, it was used as anti-pornography propaganda.

The response to Satan's Underground was immediate and widespread. Other Satanic breeders were interviewed on daytime TV shows, and Lauren herself appeared on Oprah with Johanna on the February 17, 1988 broadcast. She also appeared in Geraldo Rivera's 1988 special Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground (available on YouTube), and on Christian programs like CBN's Straight Talk and The 700 Club. On these programs, her testimony was used to prop up the contention that Satanists posed a real, ongoing threat to the average American.
On the Geraldo special (which seems to have drawn part of its title from her book), Lauren described the murders of her three children and said the hearts are commonly removed from sacrificed infants. She said she still suffered nightmares in which her son Joey is missing, and she can't find him.

For the next decade, Stratford gave presentations at Christian gatherings and ritual abuse seminars. She networked with Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) survivors and their therapists, becoming friends with Dr. Catherine Gould, a California psychologist who compiled a widely-distributed list of SRA "symptoms" in the '80s.
She published two more books. In the third, Stripped Naked (Firebird Press, 1993), she revealed that her childhood abuse had involved Satanism and sophisticated mind-control programming designed to manipulate her alter personalities (Dissociative Identity Disorder). The Satanists trained some of her alters to commit suicides if Lauren's repressed memories ever began to surface.
Lauren claimed she was stunned and alarmed to learn she had MPD/DID, but in Part II we'll see she had a keen interest in that subject long before she met the Michaelsens.

Despite a devastating 1991 expose in Cornerstone magazine (the same Christian periodical that dismantled Mike Warnke's bogus stories), Stratford's staunchest supporters somehow found ways to reconcile all the contradictions and unanswered questions of her confusing, overlapping accounts. They overlooked clear signs that she may have suffered from a factitious disorder. They politely ignored her refusal to name names.
But eventually, Lauren Stratford's tales became so impossibly bizarre that all but her most deluded supporters were forced to abandon ship.

Part II: Unearthing the Underground

The Prodigal Witch: A Thumbnail Sketch of Johanna Michaelsen

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Before we get into the story of Lauren Stratford, let's take a quick look at another woman who had a powerful influence on the Satanic panic of the '70s, '80s, and '90s.
Without Johanna Michaelsen, Stratford and other "former Satanists" might not have achieved superstardom within the Christian community. As a former New Age believer who had been born again, Michaelsen used their stories to support her ongoing crusade against the occult and all "non-traditional" religions. She turned a blind eye to the implausibilities in these stories, and never sought confirmation that they were actually true. When the stories were exposed as fabrications or fell apart on their own, she either strenuously defended them or simply moved on to the next one without comment.

But she's not content to just spread the lies and misinformation of others. Michaelsen herself has thrown out a great deal of nonsense about the paranormal, Halloween, and earth religions. In a single interview with The 700 Club in 1999, she attempted to tie school shootings to the occult and industrial/metal music (blaming Rammstein for the Columbine massacre, even though Klebold and Harris didn't know German); stated the Celts used Ouija boards; and warned that Satanists are grooming our children for their imminent "reign" by indoctrinating them with Halloween festivities. Because we all know that Satanists like to dress up as Disney princesses and beg door-to-door for Laffy Taffy, right?

Johanna, born in the '40s, was raised by American parents in Mexico. She began having paranormal experiences at the age of eleven, starting with horrific visions of severed body parts. These gave way to more pleasant encounters with angels. As an adult, Johanna still believes these visions were real and that she inherited the supernatural abilities of her great-great aunt, Dixie Jarratt Haygood. In the late 1800s, Haygood performed as Annie Abbott, the Little Georgia Magnet (as did several other women, it seems). She hoisted grown men and furniture into the air, balanced heavy objects on her fingertips, and exhibited other signs of superhuman strength, but as fellow "wonder girl" Lulu Hurst later revealed in a tell-all memoir, these were fairly simple parlour tricks. When the vaudeville acts grew stale, Mrs. Haywood turned to trance mediumship. In other words, she was a magician. That Michaelsen actually believes this woman possessed superpowers indicates she is far removed from reality. Or as they might say in Georgia, "Porch light's on, but nobody's home."

Johanna wanted to become an actress, but in her twenties grew so fascinated by psychic phenomena that she instead devoted herself to an array of what she now considers "occult" practices: yoga, meditation, Silva Mind Control, etc. After her acting class experimented with mental telepathy, Johanna attempted to psychically influence others and was, she claims, partially successful. She even summoned Jesus during visualization sessions and received guidance from him.

In 1970 she apprenticed herself to a Christian psychic surgeon in Mexico, the famous Pachita. This elderly woman claimed to be possessed by the spirit of a powerful healer she called Hermanito Cuauhtemoc, an Aztec warrior who appeared to perform miraculous healings in the name of Jesus.
Over a fourteenth-month period, Johanna assisted over 200 psychic surgeries that were mostly successful. But she gradually realized that some "patients" experienced intense pain during Pachita's procedures, that not all of them were healed, and that Hermanito was a jerk.
One night in 1972, Johanna felt a "black cloud" descend over her and heard voices threatening to kill her as demons pressed their faces against a window, leering in at her.
She ultimately decided all of her mystical experiences had actually been demonic counterfeits, and turned away from them to accept the true Christ.

This had a lot to do with her younger sister Kim, who had been a fundamentalist Christian throughout this time. It was Kim who advised Johanna to meet with Os Guinness and other Christian counselors at L'Abri, Switzerland, where Johanna fully embraced Christianity for the first time.
Kim became the third wife of Hal Lindsey.
Johanna married Randolph (Randy) Michaelsen, then an associate pastor at the Tetelestai Center church in Torrance, California. He is currently the pastor of King's Harbor Church in Torrance.
The Lindseys and Michaelsens all attended Tetelestai Center throughout the '70s and '80s, at the peak of Hal's popularity as a Christian author. His Planet Earth books, which blended pop eschatology with dire prophecies about geopolitical trends, were bestsellers.

In 1982, Harvest House published Johanna's first book, The Beautiful Side of Evil, with a foreword by Hal Lindsey. It documented her "occult" experiences and conversion to Christianity. From then until now, she has appeared on numerous TV shows and given presentations to expose the dangers of the occult, with particular emphasis on New Age "infiltration" of Christian churches. Her appearance on The John Ankerberg Show, alongside The God Makers author Dave Hunt, is available on Youtube.
At the height of Satanic panic in the U.S. (the late '80s and early '90s), she warned of widespread crime and ritual abuse supposedly being perpetrated by devil-worshipers.

In 1987, the Michaelsens took a middle-aged woman known as Lauren Stratford into their home for a month. She claimed she had recovered memories of belonging to a murderous Satanic cult in the '60s, and needed help healing from the trauma. They introduced her to Hal Lindsey and several other prominent Christian authors, who all encouraged Stratford to write her life story. Her memoir, Satan's Underground, was published by Harvest House in 1988. Johanna wrote the introduction to it. In February of that year, she and Lauren appeared together on Oprah to describe the Satanic atrocities Lauren had survived. They also appeared together on Hal Lindsey's TV show.

In 1989, Harvest House published Michaelsen's second book, Like Lambs to the Slaughter, a guide for parents on how to prevent the occult from encroaching on their children's souls. Among other things, she warned against letting kids watch The Smurfs because one episode featured Gargamel standing in a pentagram, casting a spell. This was cited by a few anti-occult crusaders of the '80s (see Phil Phillips' hilarious Turmoil in the Toybox, for example), but what Gargamel really did in the episode "Winged Wizard" was draw a hexagram on the floor and bounce up and down on one foot chanting, "Upsis downsis hoozie whatzits, rara avis 31 flavours." Which is probably more product placement than Satanic ritual, if you ask me.

In the '90s, Hal Lindsey left Kim for one of his Bible study students. She became his fourth (and current) wife. This probably eroded the relationship between Lindsey and the Michaelsens.

In 1991, Cornerstone magazine investigated Lauren Stratford's background and discovered that it bore little resemblance to the stories she told in Satan's Underground. Among other things, Stratford had claimed to have inside information about ritual abuse supposedly occurring in California daycare centres during the mid-'80s. She imposed herself upon the parents of the alleged victims and told bizarre stories that could not be verified - not that they had any direct bearing on the abuse allegations, anyway. Johanna admitted to the Cornerstone researchers that she knew of Stratford's more outlandish tales before Satan's Underground was published, but failed to explain why she unquestioningly accepted Stratford's other stories. She also admitted that Hal Lindsey had been "bluffing" when he told his TV viewers he possessed documentation of Stratford's claims (see "Satan's Sideshow" by Bob and Gretchen Passantino and Jon Trott).

In 1992, when Cornerstone exposed the lies of "former high priest" Mike Warnke, Michaelsen fired off an angry letter to the editors. Without addressing any of the information the authors had uncovered, she accused them of trying to "annihilate" Warnke. Her message seemed to be that if someone is a strong voice for Christ and brings in new believers, deception and fraud are beside the point.

The Prodigal Witch VIII: "Elaine" Part II

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Dr. Brown's Story

Rebecca Brown's story, as told in Closet Witches and in her books, is every bit as weird as Elaine's. It includes religious persecution, demonic possession on an epidemic scale, and sinister medical conspiracies.

Bailey was born in Indiana in 1948. Though her parents were Christians, she came to believe that their church was evil because "drunkenness and adultery were rampant". As a result of attending this ungodly church, her parents became "evil and demonically controlled". (1)

Brown claims the hospital in which she met Elaine (not named by her, but known to be Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie, Indiana) was a hellhouse where the forces of darkness had been loosed, not alike Lars von Trier's Kingdom. According to her, this is because most of the staff had turned away from Christ and were immersed in New Age/Satanic practices.
First of all, the hospital was plagued by mysterious deaths. When Brown expressed puzzlement and concern to her superiors, they warned her to keep quiet about it. So Brown did her own investigating, and discovered that a staggering 75% of the patients were suffering ICU psychosis, and all of these people were experiencing vivid hallucinations of demons. At least, most people would consider them hallucinations. Brown, as a fundamentalist Christian, decided the demons were real. (2)

This mass possession coincided with local religious persecution and Satanic activity, as well as New Age beliefs among hospital staff. A local pastor (unnamed) spent months in the hospital after he was kidnapped, beaten, partially skinned, and burned by vindictive Satanists who didn't appreciate his prosetylization efforts.
To Brown's dismay, nurses told an elderly patient she should let go of her will to live so she could be reincarnated. One laid hands upon the old woman and uttered strange incantations, trying to summon "higher powers" that could ease her transition into death. Instead, she summoned a terrifying demon.
At Bible study, Brown met a nurse named Lynn who confirmed that certain nurses were witches trained to encourage some patients to die. She also discovered that her town was located just 20 miles from the second-largest centre of Satanism in the US., next to L.A./San Francisco (possibly Chesterfield). "There was a whole town that was made up of Satanists and they had a Satanists' church, but they also had a lot of denominational Christian Churches they attended to put on a good front." Lynn revealed that many of the nurses and several of the doctors on staff at the hospital were Satanists.
The elderly woman was so frightened by demonic apparitions that Brown agreed to stay by her bedside through the night, and for the first time she experienced intense demonic oppression, feeling as though "something was literally trying to squash my body into the floor." (2)

Brown took it upon herself to protect every patient in the hospital from demonic interference. To her mind, this was a spiritual battle: Jesus and Rebecca against nearly every doctor and nurse in the hospital. Every night, she walked through the wards quietly uttering prayers for protection. After she started doing this, the death rate in the ICU dropped by 50%. (2)

Though she didn't know it at the time, Brown's most powerful enemy was Elaine. As Satan's wife, Elaine was in charge of the community's Satanic underground, and her husband explicitly ordered her to kill the obnoxious doctor who was stymying all his efforts. It was Elaine who sent out the order for the pastor to be abducted and tortured, but two such incidents in a single year would have attracted too much attention. "So I organized a national effort between [sic] top witches nationwide to get rid of Rebecca." The witches, knowing that Brown suffered a rare muscle disease, prayed for the disease to worsen. It did.
Brown's minister friend, "Pastor Pat", didn't know about any of the goings-on at the hospital. Yet he realized that Brown was suffering demonic oppression, and could soon die. He had his 200 parishioners pray for her. Thanks to Pat's efforts, Brown was freed from the influence of the witches and her disease was miraculously cured. (2)

The demons were so annoyed by this turn of events that they physically manifested and beat the tar out of Elaine. Satan was also highly displeased with her. He demanded to know why Brown wasn't dead yet, and ordered his wife to hurry up. This is around the time she was saved. Even after turning to Christ, however, Elaine continued to cling to witchcraft. The result was that Man-Chan and "several hundred" other demons stuck around, making her life difficult. (2)

Brown claims she experienced severe personal losses as a result of her fight against the Satanists. But she's cool with that, because God had warned her she would have to make sacrifices to do His work properly. On Closet Witches, she tells Jack Chick she resigned from her job to devote herself full-time to the battle against the Devil. As we'll see, this is not what really happened.
Brown contends that most, if not all, Christian churches have been infiltrated by Satanists, meaning Satanists-cum-Christians like Elaine face opposition even from their new faith communities. This is an absurd statement made by many ex-witches/former Satanists, and I would like to see some hard evidence for it. The notion that a Satanist would spend hours of every week attending a Christian church, posing as a Christian, is every bit as ridiculous as the idea of a devoted Baptist joining his local Satanic church to spread the gospel. It just doesn't happen.
At this point in Closet Witches, Chick complains that he and other Christians faced the same sort of persecution when God commanded him to launch a vicious, hoax-based attack against the Catholic church.
Then he makes a very strange confession. He admits that when he suspected a witch of sending curses against him, he prayed that God would return those curses tenfold. Wow, dude. If that's not persecution by paranormal means, what the hell is? How can he bellyache about mean ol' witches when he behaved worse than they (allegedly) did?
Though he expresses contrition for his behaviour, he also warns Christians not to return curses because it could kill them. Not because it's unchristianly to curse people. Not because curses are nonsense. Because uttering a curse could kill them. Sheesh, it's like time travel; I swear we stepped back into the Dark Ages for a second.

One story in Brown's Prepare for War concerning this period defies explanation. In this account, an angel descended from Heaven to kill Elaine because God considered her a "nuisance". Brown prostrated herself before this angel and begged to be killed in Elaine's place. The angel settled for making Brown severely ill for a brief period.

Brown's friends and former colleagues supposedly abandoned her when she left her job at the hospital, and family members even tried to commit her to a mental institution. People close to Brown, including her pastor, also disapproved of Elaine's presence in her home, possibly because Elaine attacked her with a butcher knife one day. Brown sensed that this attempted murder was really the work of Man-Chan, so she continued to let Elaine live with her. Pastor Pat performed an exorcism on her, expelling hundreds of demons in the span of eight hours. Unfortunately, he didn't get rid of all the demons. Within a week, Elaine was in the full grips of possession again. For two months poltergeist activity, psychic attacks, and other supernatural phenomena plagued Brown's house. Both women were brutally beaten and abused by discarnate entities. Elaine repeatedly tried to strangle herself to death with a belt, which Brown viewed not as self-abuse but as more manifestations of the demonic. "I'm convinced that most suicides are actually not done by the person themselves, but by a demon within them controlling their body," she told Chick. This echoes John Todd's assertion that many medical conditions, including epileptic seizures, are caused by demons. Brown even contends that Satanic and "Voodoo" curses are highly effective, capable of blocking a person's spiritual growth. (2)

It was only after Elaine renounced all her witchcraft powers and prayed for forgiveness that the nightmare abated somewhat. Another deliverance session with Pastor Pat expelled the last of the demons, including Man-Chan.

Brown warns that partaking in any "occult" activity (such as Satanism, Freemasonry, Catholicism, Dungeons & Dragons, or rock music) can open the door to demonic influence.

In Closet Witches, Brown and Chick lay a guilt rap on fellow Christians who don't take ex-witches into their homes or at least counsel them. Chick gripes that a pastor at Melodyland (the California megachurch despised by John Todd and Mike Warnke) refused to believe that witches could be brought to Christ. As a result, 60 former witches gave up all hope and died of drug overdoses. It's unclear how Chick acquired such information. Did he track down all of these ex-witches? Did he hear second-hand reports of their fate? As with the mission field fairytales of Kurt Koch, anecdotes take the place of hard information.

You have to wonder just how many witches and Satanists there are in the U.S., if each ex-witch has brought hundreds of other witches to Christ - as nearly all of them claim to have done. The numbers would be truly staggering. In reality, there are roughly 200,000 to 1.2 million neopagans, Satanists in the U.S. The number of Satanists is unknown, but would be extremely low relative to other minority religions. Needless to say, these numbers were considerably lower in the '80s.

Chick expressed concern about the number of Freemasons and Catholics who have infiltrated Protestant churches, a concern shared by John Todd and Bill Schnoebelen. Elaine told him you can always spot a Mason by his flamboyance and arrogance. Chick trotted out his absurd claim that Masonry, at its highest levels, is controlled by Jesuits. That's a neat trick, considering that Catholics are not permitted to become Freemasons. To prop up this incredibly weak conspiracy theory, Chick reads a letter from an anonymous former Mason and ex-Nazi who alleges that the Pope is the master of Freemasonry, just as "Dr." Rivera says. How convincing.
But Elaine obligingly confirms Chick's suspicion that "the Evil Trinity" (Catholics, Masons, and witches) works together to infiltrate and subvert Christian churches. That's not surprising; the testimony in Closet Witches seems tailor-made to appeal to Chick's own specific theories and prejudices. Elaine flatters him by saying it was one of his pamphlets that persuaded her of Christ's power, and by identifying him as one of the targets of the Satanists' wrath.

After resigning from Ball Memorial Hospital, Brown set up a private practice in another town (not named by her, but known to be Lapel, Indiana). Here the harassment escalated. Somehow, the Satanists played a role in the death of Brown's mother, and possibly struck Elaine with leukemia. Elaine was confined to her bed for half a year, semi-comatose, as Brown worked desperately to save her life.
Their church and their families turned against them, refusing to help in any way. This is when the Satanists broke into Rebecca and Elaine's home, murdered their pets, and trashed Rebecca's office. Though Elaine was still severely ill, they had little choice but to flee Indiana.

The number of preposterous statements made by Brown and Elaine are too numerous to count. We've seen a lot already: Satan getting married in a Presbyterian church, the Pope ruling over a horde of "flamboyant" Freemasons, etc. Here are a few more, told by Brown on Closet Witches and in her books:

- A teenage girl found herself suicidally depressed and "bound" by demons because of "weekend experimentation with street drugs during a slumber party around age 13." Come on. A kid's spiritual life is destroyed because she used an illicit substance once in puberty? Are you freaking kidding me? Where is the evidence - Biblical or otherwise - that one-time drug use is sinful and injurious to one's spiritual well-being? Even if that's so, where do we draw the line, here? Would a single toke separate you from God? What if you don't inhale? What if someone slips you a mickey - would the spiritual effect be the same, even though you don't realize you've taken a street drug? You see how silly this line of reasoning can get. (1)
- Most herbalists and health food purveyors are witches or yogis who utter incantations over their merchandise. Consuming any of this stuff leaves one vulnerable to demonic attack. Unholy granola! Satan's supplements! (1)
- It's wrong to be a vegetarian. Vegetarians lack the physical strength required to fight demons, as they consume only "incomplete proteins". Remember, this woman is a doctor. (1)
- "Be aware that many children’s toys are actually statues of demon gods." (2)
- Because of African tribal warfare, today's African-American communities have been cursed with violence. (3)
- "Every Rock music record and tape has a demon attached to it." Again, this is straight from the mouth of John Todd, who claimed that record producers took master recordings into Satanic temples and literally inserted demons into them. She urges parents to destroy any rock albums or D&D merchandise owned by their children, citing Deuteronomy 7:25-26, in which God urges his followers to slaughter the Canaanites and destroy all their religious stuff. Because that would be a sane and humane thing to do. (1)
- If you don't inform your Catholic friends that they are "witches" destined for Hell, then you are basically a witch yourself. Really? I wonder if Brown told her Catholic financial backers this, right before they handed her a substantial sum of cash to open up her private practice. (1)
- Brown herself suffered 13 years of demonic attack just for viewing the King Tut exhibit, because all Egyptian artifacts are cursed. (3)
- Sorority and fraternity members are particularly prone to demonic attack. When they pledge loyalty to a deceased founder, they are actually declaring their devotion to a demon. (1)
- A minister's family experienced Amityville-style paranormal activity (blood oozing from walls, objects whizzing through the air of their own accord, etc.) because the minister's 18-year-old stepdaughter had become demonically possessed after her natural father molested her. The belief that sexual abuse causes possession in victims, rather than perpetrators, is disturbingly common among Christians interested in demonology (notably Bob Larson and the late Dr. M. Scott Peck). On Brown's advice, the minister ejected the young woman from his home and this ended the demonic phenomena. (1)
- Satanic ritual abuse is real, and its primary aim is to "place demons" into children. She offers some appalling advice to parents who discover their child has been abused: "The first decision is whether to notify the authorities. You must carefully seek the Lord's wisdom on this issue. We are most certainly in the last days and our country is almost totally corrupt." In other words, don't even give the authorities the chance to do the right thing. Just let child molesters, rapists, and even murderers run amok in your community if God "tells" you to do so. What Brown is suggesting would actually place her readers on the other side of the law, as most states require you to report suspected child abuse. (1)
- Brown portrays Satanists as homicidal thugs. Without giving a single solid detail, she told Jack Chick that a Satanic coven slaughtered a fourth of its members for betrayal (briefly becoming Christians). In other words, Brown knows of 25 murders and she's not naming names. This is quite typical of the former witches in this series. They claim to have witnessed human sacrifices, rapes, and a host of other atrocities - but they don't report these alleged crimes, nor provide enough information for the alleged crimes to be exposed. That's very odd behaviour for people who are "fighting Satanism" and "saving souls". If they really want to protect the rest of us from baby-eating, virgin-slaughtering Satanists, they can start by learning to dial 9-1-1.

Unless, of course, they're bluffing about all this carnage. And I think the evidence will show that Ruth Brown and "Elaine" were doing just that.

The Exposure of "Elaine" and Dr. Brown

Surprisingly, one of the Christian media outlets that called the Elaine story into question was the Personal Freedom Outreach Newsletter, which had promoted the anti-Wiccan agenda of Tom Sanguinet back in '83. In 1989, writers G. Richard Risher, Paul R. Blizard, and M. Kurt Goedelman delved into the backgrounds of Ruth and Elaine. What they discovered flatly contradicted much Jack Chick's material about the two women.

First of all, Rebecca Brown did not exactly resign freely from her job at Ball Memorial Hospital. She was asked to leave when her deliverance rituals and religious paranoia began to disturb patients and staff. She left Ball Memorial and set up a practice in the town of Lapel. She and Elaine set up housekeeping in the nearby town of Pendleton, telling locals they were sisters.
Interestingly, Brown's funding came from a Catholic hospital. She certainly didn't mention that to Jack Chick when they were discussing the Catholic-Masonic plot to destroy Bible-believing churches.
In 1984, under her original name, Ruth Bailey, she was stripped of her license to practice medicine in the state of Indiana. The events leading up to this are deeply unsettling. On October 17, 1983, Elaine was admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital in Indianapolis after receiving a near-fatal overdose of painkillers, her body covered with bruises and lesions from multiple injections. Significantly, she was not suffering from leukemia or any other serious medical condition.
Officer Samuel E. Hanna of the Madison County Police found that Edna had been under the treatment of one Dr. Ruth Bailey. Subsequent investigation revealed that Bailey, in a six-month period, had written prescriptions for 330 vials of Demerol. She had regularly administered 600-900 cc of phenobarbitol to Edna, when 150-200 cc is typically a fatal dose.
The following May, when Bailey was summoned to appear at a hearing of the Indiana Medical Licensing Board, she was residing in Niles, Michigan. She was found guilty in absentia, and her medical license was revoked.
The witness testimony at this hearing was profoundly disturbing. Several people testified that Bailey brandished a handgun and threatened to shoot them because they were possessed by demons. Ruth's former live-in housekeeper testified that Ruth and Edna were more than just friends and housemates; they shared the same bed. Far from living in the sanitary conditions a cancer patient would require, the two women lived in squalor. Their house was strewn with garbage, used syringes, food, animal feces, and overflowing ashtrays. Some of the witnesses had watched Ruth injecting not only Edna with morphine and Demerol, but also herself and teenage Claudia. Ruth explained to them that God had allowed her to "share" her patients' illnesses, to ease their burden.
Worst of all, Bailey had misdiagnosed several patients (including Edna and Claudia) with serious ailments including leukemia, gallbladder disease, blood disorders, and brain tumours. She told the women that these conditions were caused by demons, and claimed that God had granted her the ability to diagnose diseases other physicians could not. She prescribed massive amounts of painkillers without adequate instruction, supervision, or record-keeping; some of her patients subsequently had to go through detox, and underwent withdrawal. She falsified patient information on charts and records to convince other doctors that her patients were severely ill. (4)

There are many unanswered questions about this incident. Who checked Edna into St. Vincent's? Did Ruth flee to Michigan alone, or did Edna accompany her? Where was Claudia while her mother was in hospital? Why was Edna diagnosed with leukemia and given massive quantities of drugs? Was Bailey drugging her friend to keep her dependent, or had the two women fallen into a dangerous folie a deux involving delusions of terminal illness and Satanic persecution (not to mention drug addiction)?

These questions may never be answered, but we can address some of the other claims made by Ruth Bailey. For instance, did Satanists have any role in the death of Ruth's mother, Lois Bailey? It's unlikely. Mrs. Bailey was 75 years old when she succumbed to a heart attack on December 31, 1982. (4)

What about the mayor of Muncie and the chief of police being Satanists? Brown gives this as her sole reason for not turning to law enforcement when Satanists started harassing her.
Well, the late Robert Cunningham was the ougoing mayor (1980 was an election year). Brown may have considered him a badass, but his gravestone tells a slightly different story. I don't think there's a self-respecting Satanist on earth who would choose such a fuzzy-wuzzy epitaph. At any rate, even if Cunningham was the nicest Satanist in the world, he was replaced by Republican Alan K. Wilson, and Wilson was replaced in '84 by the late "Big Jim" Carey. Were both of these men devil-worshipers, too? Watch the classic 1982 documentary The Campaign, part of the PBS series "Middletown", and decide for yourself. It chronicles the 1980 mayoral race between Wilson and Carey.

In 1986, Ruth Bailey legally changed her name to Rebecca Brown. She continued to refer to herself as a doctor, though she never acquired a license to practice medicine outside Indiana.

Like the other people in this series, Bailey declined to give the names of witnesses who should have been able to corroborate parts of her story. For instance, the doctor at Ball Memorial who learned of the Pavulon in Elaine's IV, or the nurse who confessed to helping poison her food. Neither she nor Elaine reported any of the attempted poisonings and bombings. She does not name any of the murderous doctors or nurses at Ball Memorial, which would be quite inconsiderate if her stories were true - shouldn't the public be warned?

"Elaine" was Edna Elaine Moses (nee Knost). Her witchy background turned out to be solidly Christian, though I suppose she could argue this was actually evidence of her infiltration efforts. Her high school yearbook (1965) listed her as a member of the Bible Club, and she married in a Foursquare Gospel church. (4)

Throughout the late '60s and the '70s, Edna/Elaine lived with her mother and stepdad in her hometown of New Castle, Indiana, working at a series of low-paying jobs. She then became a Practical Nurse (LPN) and worked in nursing homes in and around New Castle. If she lived the jet-setting life of a Regional Bride of Satan, no one seems to have noticed.

Strangely, Edna used an array of aliases after meeting Ruth Bailey. She sometimes used the surnames Bailey or Brown, her maiden name, or various combinations of her given names. Though she could have argued this obfuscation was necessary to shield herself from the Satanists, Edna's location was usually known.

After their adventures in the Midwest, Edna and Ruth packed their bags and headed to California, home of Chick Publications (and a large number of the other ex-witches in this series). Chick not only published their stories, but hired them to work for him. They also landed speaking engagements at several churches.

Edna eventually drifted away from Ruth, and passed away in 2005.

Ruth married the Daniel Michael Yoder (real name William Joseph Stewart) on December 10, 1989. (4)
Yoder/Stewart has a very mysterious background. He claims he was born into a very wealthy Jewish family of international bankers (hinting at the Rothschilds, which brings to mind the "Satanic Nephilim" nonsense of Doug Riggs) and schooled by Rabbinical and Cabbalistic scholars at an exclusive Swiss boarding school between the ages of 6 and 19. He was ritualistically tortured by the staff of this school. As soon as he arrived, the rabbis locked him in basement dungeons and dumped poisonous spiders on him. This is when Jesus appeared to Daniel and miraculously healed the spider bites. But he didn't become a Christian until his 30s.
Upon completing grad studies in Switzerland, Yoder went to work in his grandfather's business. He later inherited it, and started some businesses of his own as well. When he was 30, his parents forced him into a strategic marriage with a woman named Kai, also a victim of "Cabbalistic abuse". She soon converted to Christianity, which so enraged their families that hitmen were hired to kill the young couple. They were captured on the run and shipped to Israel. Daniel was chained to a wall, forced to witness Kai being tortured to death for her refusal to renounce Christ. She was with child at this time, having miraculously conceived in spite of a non-medical hysterectomony performed upon her in childhood at the behest of the evil rabbis.
Yoder fled to a remote cabin in the United States, where Kai's martyrdom and her copy of the Bible finally persuaded him to accept Jesus.
Like his second bride, Yoder offers no verifiable details of any of his stories. (3)

At the time of his marriage to Brown, Yoder was using another man's social security number. The newlyweds relocated from Arizona to Lake Park, Iowa, where Yoder passed himself off as a retired neurosurgeon whose father had also been a doctor. He befriended Dickinson County Sheriff Greg Baloun, telling Baloun tall tales about his days as a surgeon. In one fairytale, he used a modified Chevy Cordoba with a 40-gallon gas tank to make emergency trips between California and Nevado, speeding along the highways at 200 miles an hour.
Within a six-month period, Yoder and Brown lived in three different communities in northeastern Iowa and set up a ministry called Wells of Living Grace. The authorities discovered that Yoder was using several aliases and forging documents to prop up his false identities. He had served time in Minnesota and Missouri for simiar offenses. Perhaps knowing the law was at their door, Yoder and Brown returned to Arizona.
In 1991, Yoder was arrested in Pheonix and extradited to Iowa to face charges of falsifying motor vehicle registrations, driver’s licenses, and social security records. He ultimately pled guilty in exhange for a modest fine, then resumed life in Arizona. Later the couple would relocate to Arkansas.
Together, Yoder and Brown established a ministry called Harvest Warriors. Their website describes Yoder as a "prophet, healer, and evangelist", and claims that in 2002 he was presented with the National Republican Congressional Gold Metal for leadership, on the recommendation of Newt Gingrich. (5)

Yoder's real background remains largely unknown.

In 1992, the Christian publisher Whitaker House reprinted the first two books by Rebecca Brown, and they have remained in print since that time.
The Reverend William W. Woods, pastor of Deer Valley Church of the Nazarene in Phoenix, the minister who married Yoder and Brown, wrote the foreword to their first book, Unbroken Curses (1996), and continues to support their work. (5)

Yoder and Brown continue to travel and preach, spreading curse theology and misinformation about neopaganism and the the "occult". Last March, Yvonne Kruger of Prophetic End Time Ministry invited Brown to speak in South Africa.

Though Brown's star has definitely fallen since the mid-'80s, she retains a small corps of fans who enthusiastically recommend her books. Last year, a sixth-grade science teacher in Brooklyn was mildly reprimanded for distributing and selling copies of They Came to Set the Captives Free to some of his students.

Sources:

1. Prepare for War by Rebecca Brown, M.D. (Chick Publications. Chino, Calif., 1987)
2. Closet Witches summary @ Monsterwax.com (reposted @ James Japan's homepage). Retrieved June 26/11.
3. Unbroken Curses: Hidden Source of Trouble in the Christian's Life by Rebecca Brown, M.D. and Daniel Yoder (Whitaker House, 1996)
4. "Drugs, Demons, and Delusions: The 'Amazing' Saga of Dr. Rebecca Brown" by
by G. Richard Fisher, Paul R. Blizard and M. Kurt Goedelman. Originally published in The Quarterly Journal of Personal Freedom Outreach. Vol. 9, No. 4, October-December 1989. (reposted @ Cult Help and Information)
5."The Curse of Curse Theology": The Return of Rebecca Brown, M.D." by G. Richard Fisher and M. Kurt Goedelman @ Personal Freedom Outreach.org

The Prodigal Witch VIII: "Elaine"

2011-06-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

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The two-for-one account of Dr. Rebecca Brown and "Elaine" plays out like every B movie you've ever seen. Satanic nurses out for blood...a marriage to the Devil...snoozy Midwestern towns run by witches...a hospital showdown between the forces of light and darkness...

The "Elaine" hoax was wholly facilitated by our old friend Jack Chick, the same guy who incorporated John Todd's nonsense into comic books about a vast conspiracy of murderous Satanic witches, and continues to spread Bill Schnoebelen's warnings about the occult dangers of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, I have yet to find a Chick source who wasn't a hoaxer or crank. It's like the man is allergic to accurate information.

So it isn't hard to believe that in the mid-'80s, when two women approached Chick with a mind-boggling story of Satanic conspiracy and evil, he bought it wholesale.
The two women identified themselves as Elaine, the former high priestess of a Satanic cult based in Indiana, and Dr. Rebecca Brown, a GP who ran a small practice in the same state. Both women were in their late thirties.
Dr. Brown had been taking care of Elaine, emotionally and physically, since her escape from the cult. She was Elaine's housemate, physician, protector, and spiritual mentor. Elaine suffered leukemia at this time, and was often confined to bed. They evidently felt it was essential to share Elaine's story with the world before her time ran out, and Jack Chick was just the man to help them do it.

Elaine's Story

Even by ex-witch standards, Elaine's story was incredibly bizarre. It involved a literal marriage to Satan, summer camps where children were forcibly initiated into Satanic witchcraft, and nearly every form of diabolical misdeed imaginable. She was even schooled in the art of bomb-making by her Satanic superiors.

On examination, however, her testimony appears to be culled from all of the other stories we've seen so far in this series. The werewolves and the marriage to Satan come from Bill Schnoebelen. The witch camps are quite similar to the witch schools described by John Todd, and the notion that all rock musicians must sign themselves over to Satan comes straight from him. Elaine's crowning as a witch queen perfectly mirrors Doreen Irvine's account. And according to Elaine, she belonged to The Brotherhood, the same cult Mike Warnke supposedly joined in the '60s. She also claims The Brotherhood is described in Hal Lindsey's 1972 book Satan Is Alive And Well On Planet Earth. These are telling statements, because Hal Lindsey was of the belief that Warnke knew nothing about the real Satanic/Illuminati network, and Satan Is Alive and Well... described general trends in various forms of occultism, rather than a single cult.

Chick sold his audio interviews with Elaine and Brown as two cassette tapes, Closet Witches 1 and Closet Witches 2.

Typically, Elaine's account contains virtually no time markers or specific names (not even her own), so verifying any of the events she describes would be a tough task. What we do know is that Elaine was born around 1947 to the Knost family of New Castle, Indiana. She spent most of her life in that area. (2)
Elaine said she was unwittingly bonded to Satan by her own mother when she was a small child, who offered up a tiny amount of Elaine's blood in exchange for surgery to correct her cleft palate. A nurse told Mrs. Knost the blood would be used for experimental purposes, but it was actually used in a Satanic ceremony in which Elaine's soul was "sold" to Satan without her knowledge. As we'll see, this was just one part of a vast conspiracy involving Indiana hospitals.

Elaine did not have the same sort of dismal, abusive childhood described by most of the other ex-witches in this series; her life was normal and relatively carefree until her teen years. Sometime in the early or mid '60s, she made the fateful decision to visit a "witch camp" with her friend Sandy. Though Elaine didn't name this place, her description of it as a community of fortunetellers and psychics indicates it was probably Camp Chesterfield, Indiana. It was here, Elaine alleged, that she was initiated into the Satanic witch cult known as The Brotherhood (once again, a "former Satanist" fails to distinguish between Satanism and witchcraft). She refused to join at first, so the palm readers locked her in a closet and brainwashed her with an audio loop that told her Jesus was dead and Satan was king. (2)

Like Warnke, Doreen Irvine, and Bill Schnoebelen, Elaine signed herself over to Satan in blood without being fully aware of what she was getting herself into. This is quite different from real covens, in which initiates are required to have at least some rudimentary knowledge of the tradition to which they are pledging themselves.

Elaine got with the program right away, though. She devoted herself to occult study and rose quickly through the ranks of The Brotherhood (not as rapidly as Mike Warnke, of course; he became a high priest in about six months). She became a high priestess and was assigned a powerful demon guide called Man-Chan. She was appointed to the International Council of Witches. (2)
At some unspecified time, she took part in a national witchcraft competition and beat out all her opponents to become the cult's "top witch". This part of her testimony is nearly identical to Doreen Irvine's story of winning a magical contest and being made "queen of the black witches of Europe" for one year.
In Irvine's account, she was given a crown of "pure gold" and ensconced on a throne, with the other witches prostrated before her.
In Elaine's account, a crown of gold was placed on her head and the other cult members "bowed down and gave homage" to her. (2)
The Brotherhood was like Irvine's UK cult in that it focused primarily on subverting Christianity. Elaine and cohorts infiltrated Bible-believing churches and worked to undermine the faith of members. She and Brown described to Jack Chick how the first church Elaine attended after becoming a Christian was infiltrated and systematically destroyed by a high priest masquerading as a born-again believer. He lured the church's members to weekly Bible studies with appeals to patriotism and godliness, then gradually undermined their religious faith until they were spiritually bankrupt. (3)

Even the brutal human sacrifices performed on each "Black Sabbath" centred around mockery of Christianity, taking the form of bloody crucifixions. Keep in mind that Mike Warnke witnessed no such rites as a high priest of The Brotherhood. (1)
In no other ways does Elaine's alleged cult resemble Irvine's. While Irvine remained in a life of heroin addiction and poverty, selling her body on the streets of London, Elaine was given royal treatment not unlike that supposedly experienced by Mike Warnke when he was a high priest of the Brotherhood in California. It's interesting that the two never met, if they both held high positions in the same nation-wide cult and traveled widely to network with other members. They were even the same age (both graduated high school in 1965). Clearly, the left hand had no idea what the left hand was doing.

Elaine did have one thing in common with Irvine, though: Awesome superhero powers. Thanks to the protection of a demon horde, she could levitate, stop bullets in midair, turn animals into other animals, and astrally project herself anywhere in the world. She could beat up high school bullies nearly three times her size. She could even injure and kill people while out of her body, though she apparently attempted astral murder on only one occasion. She and the other out-of-body witches were prevented from harming their intended victim by a perimeter guard of angels.

Who had the witches been intending to kill? Jack Chick, of course. Satan viewed his comic books and mass-produced tracts as serious threats to his empire.
So, yeah. Um, the Devil apparently reads Christian comic books. (3)

Warnke was booted from The Brotherhood for being a paranoid speed freak in '66, while Elaine's Satanic star continued to rise. She was such a special specimen that her higher-ups (the Illuminati?) selected her for the ultimate honor: Getting hitched to Satan.

According to Elaine, there are five to ten Regional Brides of Satan within the U.S. at any given time. It's a very great honor for a high priestess.
We don't know when this marriage occurred. As researchers would later learn, Elaine was married to a human in 1966, when she was 19 years old, and divorced him the following year. The marriage to Satan presumably occurred after this. (1)

The Devil manifested as a normal-looking dude for the wedding, and rented a Presbyterian church in which to hold the ceremony. If this makes any sense, let me know.
For irony's sake, apparently, the groom wore a white tux and Elaine wore a white dress.

After the honeymoon, Elaine's status in the league of Satan naturally rose. She became her husband's official delegate to the Vatican (where she met personally with the Pope), oversaw international arms deals, traveled to the Far and Near East, and met with associates in Mecca and Israel. This indicates that the Brotherhood was organized on an international level, at the very highest levels of government, which is somewhat at odds with Warnke's description of a nationally-organized cult controlled mostly by witches.
Elaine also met with many rock musicians to oversee the signing of their pacts with Satan, just as John Todd described. (2)
Weirdly, though, Elaine didn't mention the Illuminati, which Warnke identified as the power behind The Brotherhood.

Elaine's dramatic conversion story, like her dramatic Satanic initiation story, is nearly identical to Doreen Irvine's. She entered a Christian church in order to infiltrate it, but the spiritual power of the congregation was so strong that Elaine's demons tried to get her out the door as quickly as possible. They were too late. Elaine had already read a Chick tract (The Contract!), and now fully understood that her pact with Satan was null and void. She was saved. (3)

Elaine's relationship with Satan was more or less over by 1980. He was so furious over her betrayal that he cursed her with a serious illness. She was admitted to Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie and made the acquaintance of Dr. Rebecca Brown, a GP who was busily combating the powers of darkness in and around Muncie.

Ball Memorial Hospital

Brown immediately sensed that Elaine was surrounded by a demonic presence, and demanded to know if she had been involved in witchcraft.
Eventually, after Dr. Brown had earned her trust, Elaine told her all about her cult experiences and expressed a desire to break away from the Satanists. She said her (human) husband, also a member of the cult, had recently abandoned her and their mentally disabled daughter, Claudia. This was not true; she had divorced in 1967.

While she was in hospital, the Satanists tried to kill Elaine by slipping Pavulon into her IV. Fortunately, God informed Brown of this plot. She and a doctor were able to save Elaine just in time.
Brown discovered "firebombs" resembling dynamite inside her stereo, her car, and even her phone. Elaine showed her how to dismantle them. God also warned Brown that her food and coffee were being poisoned by other hospital staffers, and on some occasions miraculously removed the poison. A nurse later confessed she was in on the poisoning plot, and expressed amazement that Brown had survived after eating a poisoned lunch. (4)

After Elaine's release, she and Brown both received a letter from the cult, indicating that their every move was being observed. If they didn't cease their anti-cult activities, the writers warned, they would be ritually sacrificed at an Eastertime Black Mass. Neither woman reported her threatening letter to the police, because they knew the chief of police (along with the mayor of Muncie and other public officials) worshiped Satan.

Dr. Brown was a Christian, so she prayed for guidance on how to deal with Elaine's situation. God immediately told her to take Elaine and 12-year-old Claudia into her home, warning her that Elaine would kill herself rather than surrender to the cult. Though Elaine had embraced Christianity, her faith was still too fragile to give her the strength she needed to stand up against a powerful coalition of Satanists who wouldn't tolerate defectors. As we've seen, John Todd and Mike Warnke both had to dodge a few bullets after betraying the Satanists, while Irvine and other ex-witches faced no repercussions at all. These "well-organized" Satanists are anything but consistent.

Brown then became a one-woman conversion machine, operating a sort of underground railroad for former Satanists. She claimed to have saved about 1000 witches from murderous covens in the first half of the '80s. Her greatest success story, however, remained Elaine and Claudia.
They persisted in their mission even though the Brotherhood tried everything in its power to frighten the two women into silence, including breaking into Brown's home and slaughtering all their pets.
They bravely revealed that Catholics and Freemasons are devil-worshipers, that Dungeons & Dragons is Satan's favourite game, and that Eastern religious practices like yoga are of the Devil. Never mind that every other ex-Satanist in this series said the exact same things around the exact same time.
Elaine may have been unique in her relationship to Satan, but everything else she said was boilerplate anti-occult stuff. Chick had already churned out a multitude of tracts and comic books dealing with these subjects. Still, he was so awed by Brown and Elaine's story that his Chick Publications printed two books by Brown, He Came to Set the Captives Free (1986) and Prepare for War (1987). The first book detailed Elaine's years as a Satanic witch and her rebirth in Christ, while the second served as a manual on how to combat the Satanic menace with spiritual warfare. He Came to Set the Captives Free contains some truly bizarre scenes, like Brown's encounter with a talking werewolf. Prepare for War is full of weird anecdotes about all the ways people can become afflicted by demons, as well as the reasons why Catholicism is actually a form of witchcraft.
Brown's later books deal extensively with purging or blessing demonically-infested "unclean objects" (geisha paintings, role-playing games, tattoos, museum exhibits, certain hairdos, secondhand items, the citizenship papers of ancestors, rosaries, etc.). This preoccupation with transmitted evil is sometimes referred to as "curse theology". It offers a profoundly paranoid and negative view of the world, in which most cultural and religious artifacts that aren't Christian are vessels of the demonic.

Chick also incorporated Elaine's information into several of his comic book tracts: The Poor Little Witch, Why No Revival?, Satan's Master.
In Poor Little Witch (1987), an outcast named Mandy is lured into witchcraft by one of her schoolteachers. She learns to cast spells by the power of "Bruth", and witnesses the ritual murder of a baby "especially conceived" for sacrifice. She is told the chief of police is a Satanist. Meanwhile, the local church the schoolteacher attends turns out to be a Satanic coven in disguise. Its members are able to manipulate and exploit their new pastor, Reverend Smiley, because he isn't a fundamentalist. Mandy runs to this church for help, but of course Smiley is in the pocket of the witch-cult and turns her away. So she seeks help from a former witch, Mrs. Grayson (who somewhat resembles Rebecca Brown). Grayson attends a real church, of the Bible-based storefront variety. Its members are able to save Mandy's soul in just three panels.
Why No Revival? (1986) contains this note: "Most churches have been successfully infiltrated by witches." This reflects claims made by both Elaine and Bill Schnoebelen.

In 1987, Brown and Elaine appeared on one of Geraldo Rivera's shows about Satanism. Perhaps significantly, they were not included in his '89 special Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground. By that time, the most popular ex-Satanist testimony was that of "Lauren Stratford". She'll be the subject of the next post in this series.

Brown's books appealed strongly to daytime TV viewers and Chick's target audience (naive, slightly paranoid Christians of the fundamentalist strain). Outside those circles, however, they raised deep skepticism in readers.

Part II: Dr. Brown's Story and the Exposure of "Elaine" and Brown

Sources:

1. "Drugs, Demons, and Delusions: The 'Amazing' Saga of Dr. Rebecca Brown" by by G. Richard Fisher, Paul R. Blizard and M. Kurt Goedelman. Originally published in The Quarterly Journal of Personal Freedom Outreach. Vol. 9, No. 4, October-December 1989. (reposted @ Cult Help and Information)
2. He Came to Set the Captives Free by Rebecca Brown, M.D. (Chick Publications. Chino, Calif., 1986)
3. Closet Witches summary @ Monsterwax.com (reposted @ James Japan's homepage). Retrieved June 25/11.
4. Prepare for War by Rebecca Brown, M.D. (Chick Publications, Chino, Calif., 1987)