The United States of Paranoia (26 page)

The most infamous episode involved the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, a case study in how interrogators can manipulate small children. Kids were badgered when they said they hadn’t been victimized, and they were praised when they said what the interviewer wanted to hear. The more the children said, the more positive reinforcement they got, and the questioners didn’t seem to mind when the tales grew outlandish. One child, Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker report in their book on the case, began by saying she had no secrets to share, then eventually declared that she had been raped. After more days of questioning, she said “she was forced to drink [a teacher’s] urine and to consume his feces covered with chocolate sauce.” With time the girl “was talking about animals being slaughtered at the school and about how she was taken to a ‘mansion’ to be molested,” about adults “forcing her to take drugs, about fellating animals, about trips to a church and ‘devil land,’ and about being made to touch dead people.”
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The members of the press were initially credulous about the claims. Tom Jarriel, previously ABC’s chief White House correspondent, described McMartin as “a sexual house of horrors” in a 1984 report for the show
20/20
.
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Even when the case against the alleged molesters started to fall apart, similar witch hunts erupted in other locations without much public objection. Indeed, when prominent figures did urge caution or challenge unlikely evidence, they often found themselves accused of participating in the crimes themselves.

If you joined or led the attacks, on the other hand, you weren’t likely to pay a penalty. One politician who oversaw two overreaching child-abuse prosecutions was a Miami prosecutor named Janet Reno. In 1993, having made a name for herself, Reno went on to become the country’s attorney general; one of her first acts in that office was to approve the FBI raid that brought the federal standoff with the Branch Davidians to a fiery end. She had given the order, she explained, because she had been told that “babies were being beaten” within the compound.
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From mid-September 1986 to mid-February 1987, one sociologist reported, “Popular magazines published an average of one story about child abuse, child molestation, or missing children each week.”
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Add a third secular scare—the anticult agitation that had been bubbling since the 1970s—and the culture was receptive to the idea that a network of Satanic sects was engaged in the ritual abuse and slaughter of innocent children.

To see how much of the Todd/Warnke worldview the mainstream had absorbed, consider the special report that
20/20
devoted to the subject in 1985. The show’s anchor, Hugh Downs, declares at the start that “police have been skeptical when investigating these acts, just as we are in reporting them. But there is no question that something is going on out there.”
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Then Tom Jarriel starts describing that
something
. A drug-related killing in which the murderer appeared to have Satanic leanings. Reports of animal mutilations around the country, which “often” were “clearly used in some kind of bizarre ritual” but have “no official explanation.” An Alabama investigation of “what appears to have been a ritual” with “various Satanic paraphernalia, including pictures of the devil.” And then there’s the “Satanic graffiti” that’s “turning up on public buildings and abandoned buildings, where police suspect secret meetings are being held.” The camera zeroes in on several specimens of the graffiti, including an eye in a pyramid, which Jarriel describes as “the evil eye.”

From there we go to a potted explanation of who Satan is, a long clip from the movie
Rosemary’s Baby
(in which “modern Satanism was shockingly dramatized”), and an interview with Mike Warnke, uncritically identified as “a former Satanist,” who displays some suitably spooky-looking Devil-worship paraphernalia. We are told that a teenager hanged himself after writing on his body “666,” “Satan lives,” and “I’m coming home, master.” Then we wade deeper into conspiracy territory, with statements from two police officers, Sandi Gallant of San Francisco and Dale Griffis of Tiffin, Ohio. “We have kids being killed,” Griffis intones gravely. “We have people missing in America. We have our own MIAs right here.” Not content to invoke the ghost of Vietnam, he adds, “We have cattle being killed. We have all types of perversion going on.”

A trip to a shopping mall reveals “how easy it is for children, or adults for that matter, to get their hands on Satanic material.” The video store, we see, stocks a lot of horror movies. (Cut to Warnke. “If the devil has PR, then it is cinema,” he says.) The mall bookstore sells Anton LaVey’s
The Satanic Bible
and other occultist texts. And the music store is filled with heavy metal albums, plus records that have what “some believe” are backward Satanic references. (Cut to Chris Edmonds, who demonstrates the “sweet Satan” allegedly hidden in “Stairway to Heaven.”)

We hear about a grisly murder committed by a teenager who was interested in
The Satanic Bible
. An assistant attorney general in Maine condemns the book as “dangerous.” We get a brief sketch of the Church of Satan, and the narrator notes that police have never found a link between the religion and Satanic crimes. “However,” Jarriel adds as we see some old documentary footage of a Church of Satan service, “some incidents described to us by witnesses from around the country are strikingly similar to these ritualistic scenes.”

Finally the show tackles the topic of underground Satanic cults. These, we’re told,
are
linked to crimes . . . maybe. “Nationwide, police are hearing strikingly similar horror stories,” Jarriel tells us. He acknowledges that “not one has ever been proved,” and then he plunges into the unproved cases, as alleged participants and their relatives describe the murders that the cults supposedly force children to commit. Two boys reenact the reported ritual with a knife and a doll. Jarriel gives us a “checklist” of “Satanic practices to look for,” from sexual abuse to cannibalism to cremation. Cremation could explain why we never actually find the bodies of the sacrifice victims, Jarriel informs us: They’ve been burned. But “so far police have failed to make the connection.”

At the end of the report, Barbara Walters pronounces the story “terrifying.” It
is
rather terrifying that Hugh Downs believed the
20/20
team had “been skeptical,” given that the reporters apparently failed to interview a single skeptical voice. If you look past the program’s fearmongering tone to see what the show actually demonstrated, you get this:

•  Certain segments of pop culture like to play around with Satanic imagery.

•  Disturbed people who commit crimes sometimes like to spout Satanic mumbo jumbo.

•  There are many unsolved animal mutilations around the country, and some people think Satanists may have something to do with it.

•  There is a group called the Church of Satan, which no one has ever credibly connected to a ritual crime.

•  Some children claim to have been forced to participate in murderous Satanic rituals.

The program did not distinguish between pop-culture material that presents itself as pro-Satan, such as LaVey’s bible, and material that denounces the Devil, such as
The Exorcist
.
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The program did not explore whether it was Satanism that drew those criminals toward homicide or, as seems more likely, someone who already has homicidal tendencies might also to be attracted to the idea of worshipping evil. The program did not mention that scientists had been investigating animal mutilations since the 1970s and consistently concluded that the great majority of the beasts had died of natural causes. The only item on the list that seems to support the conspiracy narrative is the last one, in which kids become cult murderers, and it has the disadvantage of relying on claims that almost certainly were not true. The bodies of the alleged victims were never discovered, and we’ve seen in the McMartin case how children can be guided to level outlandish charges. Indeed, the McMartin case itself eventually degenerated into conspiracy theories about a secret Satanic cult.

As early as 1974, John Todd had been promoting the idea that Satanists were kidnapping young people for ritual sacrifices.
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Now a widely respected news program on a major television network was broadcasting the legend to an audience far larger than the crowd at the Open Door Church. Many more programs followed: Over the next four years, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, and Sally Jessy Raphael all did shows on the Satanic menace. (Warnke was a repeat guest.) Geraldo Rivera devoted at least three broadcasts to the topic. “Satanic cults!” he announced in one of them. “Every hour, every day, their ranks are growing. Estimates are there are over one million Satanists in this country. The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secret network. . . . The odds are this is happening in your town.”
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Charles Manson, Rivera averred in another show, was “reportedly linked to the Devil-worship underground.”
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Some cops were getting in on the act, too. In 1989, an FBI agent complained in
Police Chief
magazine about “a flood of law enforcement seminars and conferences” about occult crimes, where police would hear talks about heavy metal, Dungeons & Dragons, and “satanic groups involved in organized conspiracies, such as taking over day care centers, infiltrating police departments, and trafficking in human sacrifice victims.” Sometimes, he added, the presenters would even invoke the “ ‘Big Conspiracy’ theory, which implies that satanists are responsible for such things as Adolf Hitler, World War II, abortion, pornography, Watergate, and Irangate, and have infiltrated the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, and the White House.”
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One new fashion in Big Conspiracy circles was “The W.I.C.C.A. Letters,” purportedly the minutes of a meeting of a “Witches International Coven Council Association” in Mexico in 1981. According to the
Protocols
-like document, “decoded” and circulated by a member of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, the witches’ plans included “infiltrating boys’/girls’ clubs and big sister/brother programs,” “infiltrating schools, having prayers removed, having teachers teach about drugs, sex, freedoms,” “instigating and promoting rebellion against parents and all authority,” and changing the country’s laws to facilitate “removing children from [the] home environment and placing them in our foster homes.”
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In one of Geraldo Rivera’s broadcasts, a California cop invoked the letters’ claims as though they were demonstrably true.

John Todd continued his sexually aggressive ways. In 1984, living in Louisville, Kentucky, he molested a niece, a crime that led to five years’ probation. In 1987, living in Columbia, South Carolina, he started inviting female college students to work for a publishing company that he claimed to be launching. One applicant was invited to “role-play” different situations with Todd, an activity that ended with him forcing her to perform fellatio. Another woman thought she was applying for a job that paid $50,000 a year. When she met with Todd, he demanded sex, saying, “What do you think the $50,000 is for?”
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He then pulled a knife, forced her to take three pills, and raped her. Before she left, he warned her that a network of men was protecting him. “If you try to hurt me I could have you killed,” he said.
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With that, Todd was arrested and charged with criminal sexual assault. Two teenagers who had been taking karate lessons from Todd came forward to say he had molested them too; their accusation led to two additional charges of committing lewd acts on children. He attempted suicide twice while awaiting trial, and in January 1988, after he was convicted on the rape charge, he tried to kill himself again. Then he started filing lawsuits against the authorities. In the first suit, he demanded that the government return property it had seized as evidence, including a pair of women’s pink panties.

In 1991, Todd released a tape from prison, claiming that he had been railroaded by Senator Strom Thurmond. (The senator, Todd explained, was upset that Todd had exposed him as “the highest ranking Mason in the world.”)
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Three years later, when a Christian visiting from Britain interviewed him, Todd declared that he was a witch again. “Raised up in Wicca, you
never
lie,” he declared. “Christians break their word. All I ever saw for 18 years was Christians breaking their word. . . . I waited five years for Christians to help. I went back to Wicca.” Not that he was pro-Illuminati now. “Wiccans see the Illuminati as Jews and Christians,” he said.
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By 2005, Todd was calling himself Kris Sarayn Kollyns and suing the South Carolina Department of Mental Health for failing to “provide him with medical and psychological treatment” for gender identity disorder.
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A 2006 suit accused several state employees of insulting his Wiccan beliefs and confiscating the women’s undergarments he liked to wear. The judge ruled against him, declaring that the “plaintiff could pose a serious security threat by changing and being half-clothed in his homemade women’s underwear while in plain view of other residents in the program.”
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Finally, in November 2007, Todd died.

Todd had traveled a long way since that evening in Chambersburg, from Christian survivalist to cross-dressing witch. But by this time Todd the man and Todd the legend had been completely divorced. There were rumors that he was still alive, that he had been killed way back in 1979, that he had been released from prison in 1994 and assassinated the same day; there were rumors that the imprisoned rapist was an imposter, and there were rumors that Todd had been framed. When a viewer on YouTube mentioned Todd’s criminal record, another viewer replied: