I use the case of Paul Ingram, intelligently reconstructed in Lawrence Wright's _Remembering Satan_, in a university class I teach on the history of magic and witchcraft in early modern Europe. The case helps my students to see how innocent people can be coerced, cajoled, and arm-twisted into confessing to horrendous, even incredible crimes. Paul Ingram's case parallels almost perfectly the witchcraft confessions of the 16th-17th centuries, even though many of those confessions were elicited through torture (though others, particularly those in England and New England, were not). Ingram, a law officer himself, 'knew' the stereotypes - now discredited - of so-called recovered memory and of so-called satanic ritual abuse. A devout born-again Christian, he believed, and was egged on by his pastor and other born-again advisers, that the devil could have possessed him and prevented his being able to remember that he had allegedly committed horrific crimes with other satanists - including murder and rape. These assumptions reflect those of the age of the European witchhunts, when intellectual elites - professors, theologians, popes, princes, and lawyers - defined and then prosecuted alleged diabolical witches, for whose alleged deeds and cults we have not one shred of historical evidence.
Experts - academics, professional counselors, and law-enforcement officials - have proven that no large, organized satanic cults exist in contemporary America. They point out that more murderers claim that God told them to kill than claim that Satan told them to kill. There are no credible cases of satanic ritual abuse along the lines alleged in _Remembering Satan_. The remains of dozens of children and animals that the accusers claimed had been sacrified and buried in a field were searched for by an expert forensic archaeologist - not only did he find no such evidence, but he concluded that the earth had never been disturbed and no burials had taken place. Virtually no reputable psychologist or psychiatrist believes that 'victims' who were subjected to the most vile and ghastly crimes imaginable have somehow 'forgotten' these events; they point out that even survivors of horrible abuse in Nazi death camps do not forget what happened. Rather, they cannot forget; they remember all too well the horrors they witnessed. The book that started the SRA panic of the 1980s-90s, _Michelle Remembers_, has, since the publication of Wright's work, been convincingly discredited by groups ranging from Wiccans to evangelical Christians.
In 2003, years after _Remembering_ appeared, Paul Ingram was finally released from prison. The story that Wright tells does, then, have a denouement. The book is a compelling and chilling reconstruction of a family's nightmare. But anyone reading it should follow up with some research on current thinking on so-called SRA, recovered memory, and on Paul Ingram himself. I recommend Kenneth Lanning's lengthy study, available on the web at http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_rep03.htm (Lanning was the FBI's expert on alleged SRA, and has come to realize SRA just does not exist - a conclusion that led to his being accused of being a satanist himself!). The same website, religioustolerance.org, has numerous balanced and judicious essays on similar topics, including the Ingram case itself. This kind of research will prevent a reader from falling into the circular reasoning expressed by another reviewer on this website, who argued that the crimes were so horrendous that they must have happened.
