The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (25 page)

So, in order to “help” the children “process” their trauma and to bond with them, both the Lappes and Barbara Bass began “holding.” It was here that another pernicious belief came into play, one that unfortunately is still widely held in the mental health field. I call it the “psychic pus” theory. This is the idea that, like a boil that needs to be lanced, certain memories are toxic and must be excavated and discussed in order for people to recover from trauma. Many people still spend hours in therapy searching for the “Rosetta stones” of their personal histories, trying to find the one memory that will help their lives make sense and instantly resolve their current problems.

In fact, memory doesn't work this way. The problem with traumatic memories tends to be their intrusion into the present, not an inability to recall them. When they intrude, discussing them and understanding how they may unconsciously influence our behavior can be extraordinarily helpful. For example, if a child avoids water because of a near-drowning experience, talking it through when he is about to go to the beach may help him safely begin to swim again. At the same time, some people heal by fighting their fears and never discussing or explicitly recalling their painful memories at all. For people whose memories don't negatively affect them in the present, pressuring them to focus on them may actually do harm.

It's especially important to be sensitive to a child's own coping mechanisms if they have a strong support system. In one study we conducted in the mid-1990s, we found that children with supportive families who were assigned to therapy to discuss trauma were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder than those whose parents were told to bring them in only if they observed specific symptoms. The hour per week that the children assigned to therapy focused on their symptoms exacerbated them, rather than exorcised them. Each week, in the days prior to their therapy session, these children would begin thinking about their trauma; each week the children would have to leave school or extracurricular
activities to travel to the clinic for therapy. In some cases children became hyper-aware of their normal stress reactions, keeping tabs of every blip so they'd have something to say to the therapist. This disrupted their lives and increased rather than decreased their distress. Interestingly, however, if the child did not have a strong social network, therapy was beneficial. It probably gave them somewhere to turn that they did not have ordinarily. The bottom line is that people's individual needs vary, and no one should be pushed to discuss trauma if they do not wish to do so. If a child is surrounded by sensitive, caring adults, the timing, duration and intensity of small therapeutic moments can be titrated by the child. We observed this in practice with the Branch Davidian children and we feel the same principles hold for all children dealing with loss and trauma living in a healthy social support system.

Believing that you cannot recover unless you remember the precise details of a past trauma can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It can keep you focused on the past rather than dealing with the present. For example, some studies have found that depression can be exacerbated by ruminating on past negative events. Because of how memory works, such rumination can also lead you to recall old, ambiguous memories in a new light, one that, over time, becomes darker and darker until it eventually becomes a trauma that never actually occurred. Add the coercive, physically assaultive practice of “holding” to the malleability of the memories of young children, and you have a recipe for disaster.

During “holding” sessions the foster parents and sometimes their caseworkers and the “Satan investigators” would interrogate the youth about their devil-worshipping parents. They would ask lengthy, leading questions and dig their knuckles into the child's side until he agreed with their version of events. The children soon learned that the “holding” would stop a lot sooner if they “disclosed” their parents' cult involvement and described its rituals. Rapidly, they confirmed the tales of sacrificed babies, cannibalism, devil masks, hooded figures circling fires in the woods and Satanic altars, all originating from the questions and
prompts of the interviewers, confirming the foster parents' ritual abuse “diagnosis.” Soon, the children were saying that they had been videotaped for child pornography in a warehouse and had witnessed numerous murders. When the foster parents began to ask about whether other children were being abused by the cult, in desperation to escape the “holding,” they began to give up the names of their friends. As a result, two other children were taken from their parents, and many more were named as possible abuse victims.

Fortunately, many of these “holding sessions” and related “interviews” were audio or videotaped. As awful as they were to watch and hear, they allowed some incredible facts to emerge as we tried to figure out which children had actually been victimized by their parents, and whose parents had been accused because the Vernon children needed to name new names to please their interrogators. One thing became clear right away: if the caseworkers knew and liked the families who were accused (remember, this was a very small town, so most people knew each other), they would dismiss the Vernon siblings' accusations and ask for other names. If they didn't like the family, however, the parents would be investigated and their children taken.

That was how Brian came to be among the sixteen children in “therapeutic” foster care. Brian was a bright second-grader with a crew cut and a conscientious nature. He enjoyed watching the news, so before the sheriffs came to arrest his parents for sexually abusing him and his younger brother, he'd heard about the Vernon case on TV. The Vernons lived across the street from him and he was also friends with their children, so he had heard plenty of local gossip as well. From the media and from what neighbors were saying, Brian's parents figured out that they were likely to be the next family targeted as Satanic sexual abusers. On the day CPS came to take him away, Brian was playing outside and saw the sheriff's cars approaching, so he ran in and warned his parents. Unfortunately, he could do nothing but watch as caseworkers jolted his one-year-old brother awake from his nap and his parents were taken away in handcuffs. Brian was permitted to take one beloved item from
home with him; that he chose a Bible and not a toy should have been an early clue that he was not a being raised in a Satanic cult.

Unfortunately, from the news, Brian had also learned about another horrifying local crime. Seventeen-year-old Kelly Wilson, a wide-eyed, blonde cheerleader out of central casting, had abruptly disappeared on January 5, 1992. She was last seen leaving work at a Gilmer video store. Today, neither her remains nor any signs of her continued existence have been found. The officer on duty when her parents called about her disappearance, Sergeant James York Brown, was assigned the case.

By all accounts, Sergeant Brown worked it diligently, placing posters about the missing girl all over town, even working through the following Thanksgiving when a report (later found to be false) came in that her body might be in a local field. He convinced a local business to fund and erect a billboard requesting any information the public might have about Wilson's whereabouts. Brown rapidly identified the most likely suspect: a young man whom the cheerleader had dated and who had a prior conviction for an assault with a knife. That man's car had mysteriously been sold days after the girl's disappearance. Even more suspiciously, when the vehicle was finally located, a giant piece of its interior carpeting was missing. But the car had been washed thoroughly, inside and out, and no definitive physical evidence could be found.

That suspect, however, wasn't of interest to the social workers and the special prosecutor in the Vernon case. The ex-boyfriend had no connection to the Vernons. If he had killed Kelly, it would be just another case of a teenage love affair gone wrong, not a body that could be linked to the tales of human sacrifice the Vernon children were telling. The Vernons and their Satanic followers, the investigators were sure, must be guilty of more than beating and raping a few children and sacrificing some animals. But no one could find any bodies, nor had any local people been reported missing. Until Kelly Wilson.

The case workers and “cult crimes” investigators became convinced that there must be a connection between the Vernons and the young
girl's disappearance. They subjected seven-year-old Brian to an entire day of “holding” to find it. Brian's intelligence meant the stories he was forced to produce were far more coherent than those of the others. When nine adults surrounded him, held him down and shouted at him until he was so terrified that he soiled himself, he came up with the story that would lead to Sergeant Brown's indictment. He reported seeing Wilson victimized at the Vernon's Satanic rites. He said that “a man in a blue uniform” was there, and he made remarks about police officers being “bad.”

One of these “bad” cops became James Brown when the investigators and the prosecutor conducted a ten-hour taped interrogation of a woman with a reported IQ of seventy. Patty Clark* was the common-law wife of one of the Vernon brothers. She had a long history of abusive relationships and had herself been raised in foster care. She was facing child abuse charges related to the Vernon children, which she was told she could mitigate if she told the “truth” about Kelly Wilson's murder and James Brown's involvement in it. She later said that her testimony had literally been scripted on a white board because her interrogators had become so frustrated by her inability to reliably repeat what they told her to say. The transcripts of her interrogation vividly show the coercion used to get her statements, with interrogators repeatedly telling her that they knew that Brown was at the scene of the crime and threatening her with the consequences of “not telling the truth.” If you read them, it is hard to tell who is displaying less intelligence: the interrogators who try to make the mentally subnormal woman use the same terms for anal sex that were used by the children during their “holding” sessions, or poor Patty Clark who tries at least seven different phrases before finally being prompted by investigators with the right term.

Clark's “testimony” ultimately described a ten-day period of torture endured by the kidnapped cheerleader, capped off by a gang rape, the removal of one of Wilson's breasts, the hanging of her body to drain its blood for drinking, and cannibalism. It was Clark's child, Bobby Vernon Jr., whom the Lappes would later beat into a coma.

COERCED CONFESSIONS ARE problematic in many ways. Not least is the potential they have for leading to the convictions of innocent people. Another is that facts unknown to the interrogators may later surface to destroy their witnesses' credibility and, by extension, their own. Such facts ultimately halted Gilmer's Satan investigators and its special prosecutor. Sergeant Brown himself uncovered the most damning evidence, which is why, many believe, the special prosecutor and his minions eventually decided that the police officer had to be named as part of the cult. The problems with the evidence were multiple: there was no physical evidence linking the Vernons and the missing cheerleader; the children's claims that they were taken to warehouses to film child pornography could not be corroborated since no such warehouses (every one in the county was checked), films, photos or videos could be found; the bones found buried in the Vernons' back yard turned out to be animal, not human; a “devil mask” found in their home turned out to be a cheap Halloween costume that could serve as evidence to make the case that millions of Americans were Satanists.

But the worst piece of evidence for the prosecutor's case was that on the night of Kelly Wilson's disappearance cult “leaders” Ward Vernon and his wife Helen, who were reported to have been key perpetrators in the girl's kidnapping and death, were in New York. There were multiple documents attesting to this: Ward was a truck driver and his employer kept records of his travels, including the bills of lading required to prove delivery of the shipments. Ward even had gas station credit card receipts from New York to prove that he'd been there. When Sergeant Brown insisted that this meant that the Satan investigators had the wrong suspects in Wilson's death and that their witnesses' testimony was unreliable, the special prosecutor told him, “If you get into my investigation in any way, I will ruin you personally, professionally, financially and in every other way.”

That prosecutor made good on his threat. The Patty Clark interrogation that turned young Brian's “man in the blue uniform” into James
Brown followed. Brown's arrest—complete with a brutal takedown by a SWAT team—occurred shortly thereafter.

 

HOW WAS I GOING to determine which abuse allegations were coerced by interrogators and which had really occurred? How were we going to figure out the safest place for these traumatized children? Should they be returned to parents who were possible abusers or should they be placed in new, much more closely scrutinized foster or adoptive homes? I was pretty sure from the chronology that Brian and his little brother had been removed from their home in error, but what if their parents were genuinely abusive and the Vernon children had known about it? Then again, what if the second group, Bobby and Patty's children, had been removed only because their cousins had been coerced into naming more victims? Our chronology suggested that there was physical evidence to support the allegations of abuse against both Vernon brothers, their wives/partners and the Vernon grandparents, but the investigation was so tainted that it was hard to know what to believe.

Fortunately, I'd discovered a tool that could, in conjunction with other evidence, help us sort through the wreckage. I'd stumbled onto it by accident. Back in Chicago and just after I had moved to Houston in the early 1990s, I'd run a few marathons. While training, I wore a continuous heart rate monitor. One day, right after a practice run, I'd gone to do a home visit with a boy who was in foster care, so I was still wearing the monitor when I arrived at the house. The little boy asked me what it was, and I let him try it out, explaining what it did. When I put it on him, his heart rate was one hundred, quite normal for a boy his age at rest. Then, I realized I'd left some paperwork that I needed in my car, so I asked him if he wanted to come with me to get it. He seemed not to have heard my question, but I could see that his heart rate had shot up to 148. I thought that perhaps my monitor had broken, so I moved closer to take a look. In case I'd mumbled, as I sometimes do, I repeated what I'd said. The boy remained motionless and his heart rate moved
even higher. I was perplexed, but I saw no reason to press him to come with me. I went out to get the paperwork, returned and finished the visit.