Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He is a prolific writer who has turned his journalist’s gaze on a variety of subjects including Scientology, terrorism and in his 1993 book Remembering Satan, the Satanic panic which swept America in the 1980s.

Paul and Sandy Ingram were raising their family of four (two sons and to daughters) in Olympia, Washington. Paul was the chief civil deputy for the sheriff’s office and an active member of both the Republican party and the Church of Living Water, a Protestant fundamentalist church. On November 28, 1988, Paul was called into his boss’s office and asked if he was aware that his daughters, Erika, 22, and Julie, 18 had filed against him. They allege that their father had sexually molested them over a period of several years. Paul’s strange response was “I can’t see myself doing this.”

This is the beginning of a long, complicated investigation that makes zero sense from the outside looking in…especially for anyone reading this book now in 2024 and who has watched hours of crime dramas on television. The girls’ stories get increasingly more convoluted. Pretty soon, it wasn’t just their father, but their older brother, their mother and the police officers who often played poker with their father in the family home. And why were all these people involved? Because they were part of some sort of satanic cult. There is not a single shred of physical evidence, though, despite the girls’ claims that they were tortured, covered in scars, and that there were the bodies of dozens of babies buried on the Ingram property.

Satanic panic originated in 1980 with the publication of the book Michelle Remembers. “Michelle Remembers, written by Canadians Michelle Smith and her husband, psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, was published in 1980. Now discredited, the book was written in the form of an autobiography, presenting the first modern claim that child abuse was linked to Satanic rituals. According to the “memoir”, at the age of five Michelle was tortured by her mother for days in “elaborate satanic rituals”. As the torture reached a climax, a portal to hell opened and Satan himself appeared, only to be driven away by the Virgin Mary and the archangel Michael. Explanations for a lack of any evidence of abuse on Michelle’s body were that it had been miraculously removed by St. Mary. Not explained was testimony from Michelle’s father and two sisters, contradicting the memoir, as well as a 1955/56 St. Margaret’s School yearbook. The yearbook includes a photo taken in November 1955 showing Michelle attending school and appearing healthy, when according to Pazder’s book Michelle spent that month imprisoned in a basement. (Wiki)

Over the next decade, there were -according to Wikipedia – over 12,000 cases of unsubstantiated abuse in America. It is fascinating watching how this seemingly normal family (or at least, not Satanists) got caught up in this conspiracy and how the investigators, against their better judgement and expertise, came to believe the girls despite the numerous red flags and inconsistencies in their statements.

It’s a fascinating story.