The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (26 page)

Before my visit, I hadn't known this particular child's history; I was just there to see how he was doing in his current placement. When I got back to my office I looked up his chart. It turned out that he'd been sexually abused by his mother's boyfriend—in a garage. When this man had said to him, “Let's go out and work on the car,” what he really meant was, “I'm going to abuse you now.” Inadvertently, I'd given him a traumatic cue by suggesting that he come to the car with me. I decided to see if heart-rate monitoring might help me figure out what cues triggered trauma symptoms in other children.

Frequently, I saw the same reaction: if a child was exposed to a scent, sight, sound, or, as in this case, a verbal suggestion that lead him to recall the trauma, his heart rate would rise dramatically. For some, if cues made them experience dissociative symptoms rather than hyper-arousal responses, their heart rates would go down, rather than up. Hyper-arousal prepares people for fight and/or flight, which requires an increased heart-rate; dissociation prepares them for inescapable stress, slowing their heart rate, breathing and other functions. Although it doesn't work in every case and needs further study, heart-rate monitoring has been very useful in my work. Knowing that something or someone provoked traumatic memories in a child could often help us narrow down who or what had harmed them, especially with toddlers who were too young to tell us what had happened.

I tried this method with Brian, who by now was living in a group home. He'd been away from his parents for almost two years by this point, and it was obvious that he missed them terribly. I stressed repeatedly that if there was anything he didn't want to discuss, he should say so, and that no harm would come to him if he admitted to having lied about something in the past. I told him that this would be the chance for him to tell his side of the story. And then I colored with him for a while.

Brian had stayed with Barbara Bass. Much of the “holding” therapy and “investigation” involving the Satanic abuse took place at her home.
When I first asked him about her “therapeutic” foster home, he said that it was “kind of fun.” I encouraged him to tell me more, without prompting him about whether I wanted to know good or bad things.

“One thing I didn't like, we had holding there,” he said immediately.

“Tell me what holding is,” I said.

“She makes you run the stairs till you cry so you're, like, tired and then we go in the room and get on the bed and she lays down with ya, and she rubs your sides, like your ribs and it hurts and you scream and you get all your anger out and you talk to her about what you're mad about.”

“When she says, ‘Get your anger out,' what does she mean by that?”

“Stuff that you're just mad about. And then she makes you say stuff that you don't want to say.”

“Like what?”

“Like stuff that your parents did that they didn't do.”

“She'd want you to say that?”

Brian, who was on the brink of tears, his heart racing, nodded his head.

“Give me an example.”

“Like say that they hurt you or something. And we'd usually always have holding right before we'd come down to see a therapist or something.”

“How many times a week would you have it?”

“Probably once a month, but it depended where we were going. If we were going to testify or see a therapist or something like that, we'd have it like that day or the day before.”

I asked him how Barbara got him to say things that weren't true.

“She'd rub your sides till it hurts and after a while, you know, you're going to give in. It hurts.”

“What kinds of things did she make you say?”

Brian began to cry openly, tears running down his face and dripping from his nose. “That my parents did stuff that they didn't do,” he said, weeping. I reassured him, again, that he didn't have to tell me anything and that I wouldn't try to make him say anything that he didn't want to say, or that he didn't think was true. But he was brave and, after I gave
him some tissues, he insisted on telling me the whole story. He described the day when he was taken from his parents, how he knew when his mother began to cry that “I was going,” and how he was allowed to bring “one thing he really liked,” with him and chose his Bible. He talked about how he tried to calm his one-year-old brother, saying that “he didn't know what was going on,” and “was grumpy because they woke him up from his nap.” (The younger child didn't even recognize his mother by the time he was finally returned home.)

When I questioned Brian about the “Satanic” ritual killing of Kelly Wilson and other atrocities he'd claimed to have witnessed or taken part in, he didn't cry and his heart rate remained steady. He was very matter-of-fact and said that he'd made up those stories in order to stop from being hurt. He did not express any fear, either verbally or physically, when discussing things like “killing babies,” which was in complete contrast to when he discussed being taken from his home or the “holding” procedure. His compassion for his brother and his distress over being made to lie about his parents made clear that this was a highly sensitive, moral and caring boy. Such a child would have responded to being made to watch or participate in murder and cannibalism with agony and terror; only a sociopath could have reacted unemotionally when recalling such memories if they had been true. Brian simply would not have been able to respond so differently to these two sets of experiences, which was something I had to testify to in great length in order to get the judge who was presiding over the custody cases to allow Brian and his brother to return home.

Figuring out what had really happened to the Vernon children was more complicated. No one wanted to return children with anal and genital scarring to people who had repeatedly raped them. But the false allegations of murder and Satanic rites had so warped their credibility that their parents could now claim, quite believably, that everything the kids had said about who abused them and what had gone on was suspect. I hoped to use heart rate monitoring and other physiological and emotional cues to try to find out who had hurt these children, and find the best permanent placement for them.

I spoke with one little girl who had been a toddler when she was removed from her parents' home. Annie had had so many conversations with professionals by this time that she could mimic us. At one point in our interview she sat on a swivel chair, swinging herself back and forth, and said, “Tell me about yourself. My name is Annie and I have brown hair and brown eyes and I've been in 10,000 foster homes.” She was drinking soda from a can, and very much enjoying burping after each sip. I asked her about where her reports about Satan and killing people had come from.

“It came from my birth dad, he killed all these babies and he made me kill them or I was going to die and the babies were going to die, too,” she said, and smiled, burping up some soda. There was no movement on the heart rate monitor.

“How can you remember that?” I asked.

“I remember because my sister told me,” she said, swinging her legs. When I asked if she could remember any of this herself, she said that she couldn't, explaining that she couldn't remember anything much before she was three.

When I asked her if she remembered “holding,” her mood immediately darkened. She said in a serious tone, “Yes I do and I don't want to talk about it.” But then she described how her foster parents and caseworkers, “kept on making me talk about my past and saying that I killed babies.”

Later, when I asked her about whether she'd been sexually abused by her father, she was even more reluctant to talk. “He made me touch his privates and I said I didn't want to and he stuck my hand down there,” she said, and got up out of her chair to look out the window. When I asked if this had happened more than once, she nodded, keeping her eyes down. “He made me rub it and when I said no he said ‘You don't tell me what to do or I'll kill you.'”

Now you could see signs of fear, in the dissociative response as she physically tried to escape the question by walking away, and in her heart rate. She later returned to her chair, saying, “I can't stand the name Ward
Vernon.” She bore down on the pencil with which she'd been drawing earlier, scribbling back and forth, as if to blot out his name forever. The little girl responded similarly to discussions about her stepmother, but insisted that her real mother had never harmed her.

When I spoke with one of her older sisters, Linda, she told me that the initial idea that there had been Satanic abuse, “came from Barbara's mouth. She would say, ‘OK, you're in the dungeon with Helen, right,' and she'd press on you until the tears start running, until you say yes. She would put words actually in your mouth.” Linda, too, described sexual abuse by her father and stepmother, detailing how her grandparents were often involved. “They do it almost every day,” she said, and when I pressed her about whether she remembered this or whether she'd been told to say it, she got stern with me and said, “You would remember too if it happened in your life when you were seven years old.” Again, her physiological responses were consistent with having been sexually abused by family members, but not with her having taken part in satanic rituals and murder. None of the Vernon children were ultimately returned to their biological parents, because it was clear that they were at great risk for further abuse in that extended family.

One of the most troubling aspects of the case—and something that is important for parents to keep in mind when dealing with emotionally charged situations—was how the fear sparked by this pathetic investigation spread and caused otherwise rational people to behave in bizarre ways. Once the allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse were made public, they took on a life of their own. Even highly trained professionals in mental health and law enforcement, even some of my own staff, were not immune.

Once the children had been removed from their homes and the accusations of Satanic abuse surfaced, nearly everyone involved in their care became convinced that Satanists were going to kidnap the children and slaughter those who were now trying to help them. Despite the fact that the “cult leaders” and almost everyone else believed to have been involved in the child abuse and murder had already been incarcerated, the
Satan investigators, the case workers and the foster parents were sure there was a larger conspiracy and that they were all in mortal danger. They began behaving in an extremely paranoid fashion, even moving the children to west Texas (where Bobby Vernon was beaten into a coma) in order to evade what they believed were the still-thriving tentacles of the cult. The Lappes' suicides were seen as evidence that the cult had somehow “gotten to them.” Once belief in the power of the cult and its evil activities had been established, it was almost impossible for people to acknowledge contrary evidence.

Explaining the Lappes' suicides would seem straightforward to most people: the couple had just beaten a child they'd presumably cared for so ferociously that they'd smashed his skull, leaving him in a permanent vegetative state. Guilt, shame, sorrow—any one of these motivations would do, no Satanic cult necessary. But rather than reexamine their initial assumptions, those involved with the investigation simply became further and further detached from reality.

The town of Gilmer itself was split. Some believed that a Satanic cult resided there and had killed people and was continuing to wreak havoc, while others thought innocent people had lost their children and had been accused of unspeakable and frankly impossible crimes. Kelly Wilson's own parents exemplified the divide. Kelly's mother believed that Sergeant Brown was involved with a Satanic cult that had kidnapped and killed her daughter, while Kelly's father argued just as strenuously that Brown and the others had been railroaded and his daughter's true killer has not been found.

The judge who presided over the custody hearings for the children was convinced that Satanic rituals had taken place. The grand jury that had indicted Brown refused to reverse its indictment when the Texas attorney general's office tried to explain to them why the evidence that had previously been presented to them was unreliable. Ultimately another judge dropped the indictments, but many in Gilmer remained convinced that Satan worshippers had gathered there to abuse and kill children. During the course of my work on this case, I was accused of
involvement in the cult, my staff members reported things like dead cats on the road as evidence of “spookiness” in Gilmer, and a general atmosphere of fear predominated. Without any evidence other than the coerced testimony of sixteen children, twentieth-century adults were ready to convict half a dozen people, including a police officer who'd randomly been assigned to investigate the crime and a man whose employer's records and gas station receipts put him halfway across the country on the day of the crime.

Humans are social animals, highly susceptible to emotional contagion. Training, logic and intelligence are often no match for the power of group-think. Early humans who couldn't quickly pick up on and follow the emotional cues of others would not have been able to survive. Following such cues is a key to social success, and being unable to perceive them is a serious handicap, as we saw in Connor's case. But the “side effect” of this legacy can lead us to witch hunts like the one in Gilmer, Texas.

chapter 8

The Raven

SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Amber had been found unconscious in a high school bathroom. Her breathing was shallow, her heart rate sluggish, her blood pressure far too low. Unsurprisingly, her mother, Jill,* who had arrived at the emergency room after being called by the school, was distraught. I had just walked into the ER as well. I was the attending physician there that month and was reviewing the evaluation of a suicidal adolescent by one of the child psychiatry fellows.