Chapter 124. Satanic Panic: Ritual-Abuse Fears, Law Enforcement and the Politics of Fear (1980-Today)

For most of the history traced in this Part, the “Satanist” was a figure other people accused. Faxneld and Petersen list early-modern “witches”, “abortionists and poisoners close to the court of Louis XIV” and “certain English rakes” as people “slandered as Devil-worshippers”, none of whom “seem to actually have been Satanists” [Faxneld & Petersen, The Devil’s Party, #87532, “Introduction”]. By the 1970s real, self-declared Satanists existed (Chapters 121–122). In the 1980s accusation returned on a mass scale, aimed mostly at daycare workers, parents and alleged elites, and seldom at those organised Satanists. This chapter sets out the two bodies of literature in the library. One is the sceptical and scholarly account of a “satanic panic”. The other is the testimony of self-described survivors and the authors who believe them, presented here in their own terms.

Origins: Michelle Remembers and the Recovered-Memory Model

The Repressed Memory Epidemic traces the template to Michelle Remembers, “a 1980 account of how Michelle Smith, a depressed young woman of 27, sought therapy with psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder in the wake of three miscarriages”. In the book’s account, “with the publication in 1980 of Michelle Remembers… the element of satanic ritual abuse was added, along with the possibility of demonic possession”. It adds in a note that the book “fails to mention Michelle’s two sisters, neither of whom recalled any abuse”, and it places the episode within “the satanic ritual abuse (SRA) moral panic of the 1980s and early 1990s” [The Repressed Memory Epidemic, #53072, ch. 1]. The same chapter traces the export of the scare to Britain “largely through training seminars offered in 1988 in England by U.S. ‘experts’ such as Pamala Klein and Chicago police detective Jerry Simandl”, followed by a 1989 television programme that “appeared to substantiate alarming claims” [ibid.]. Tavris and Aronson list the assumptions they say the episode left “embedded in popular culture”: “If you were repeatedly traumatized in childhood, you probably repressed the memory of it. If you repressed the memory of it, hypnosis can retrieve it for you. If you are utterly convinced that your memories are true, they are” [Tavris & Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me), #64090, ch. 4].

McMartin and the Daycare Trials

Tavris and Aronson summarise the founding case. In 1983 McMartin teachers “were accused of committing heinous acts on the toddlers in their care, such as torturing them in satanic rituals in underground chambers, slaughtering pet rabbits in front of them”. Similar accusations followed at the Little Rascals centre, against Kelly Michaels at Wee Care in New Jersey, against the Amiraults, against Dale Akiki and against others [#64090]. Randall Sullivan describes the process. Hundreds of parents contacted the LAPD. The district attorney “referred the parents to the Children’s Center, a private therapy center”, where the interviews were conducted “mostly… with a social worker named Kee MacFarlane” [Sullivan, The Devil’s Best Trick, #64665]. Will Sommer adds that police “sent hundreds of families whose children had attended McMartin a letter” asking parents to question their children about “otherwise-innocuous events that police said could indicate ‘sodomy'”. He records the outcome: the first trial ended in 1990 with Ray Buckey’s mother acquitted on all counts and Buckey himself acquitted of most charges, the jury deadlocked at Ray Buckey’s second trial, and the case cost “$16 million” and remains “the most expensive, longest criminal” trial of its kind [Sommer, Trust the Plan, #69120, ch. 8 “Those Who Know Can’t Sleep”]. By 1987, Sullivan writes, followers of the case had heard stories “of children witnessing the mutilation of a corpse and the slow slaughter of a horse, of devil worshippers drinking blood and sacrificing a baby in a church”. In his judgement “the slow collapse of the McMartin prosecution… was what most deflated the satanic panic” [#64665]. Tavris and Aronson add an experiment by Sena Garven and colleagues that reused interview techniques taken “from the actual transcripts of interrogations of children” in such cases [#64090].

Media, Police and the Name “Satanic Panic”

Sullivan states that the phrase was “coined by sociologist Jeffrey Victor, drawing on the ‘moral panic’ theories of Stanley Cohen”. He dates the panic’s “apogee and its nadir” to “October 1987, when NBC broadcast a special hosted by Geraldo Rivera that was titled Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground” [#64665]. He also follows a later local outbreak in Childress, Texas, which the Amarillo Globe-News ranked as the top story of 1991 [ibid.]. Michael Shermer, in the Romanian edition of his work, calls Victor’s Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend (1993) “the best analysis so far”. He lists the Procter & Gamble “satanist” logo rumour, the ritual-abuse scare “triggered in England”, claims that the Mormon Church had been infiltrated by abusing Satanists, and the San Diego ritual-abuse panic [Shermer, De ce cred oamenii în bazaconii, #17912].

The primary police document in the library is Gayland W. Hurst and Robert L. Marsh’s Satanic Cult Awareness. The text carries no publication date. The National Criminal Justice Reference Service copy is stamped as acquired on 27 January 1993, and Hurst gives a Little Rock, Arkansas address. It credits Dale Griffis, Detective Sandi Gallant of San Francisco and investigators from the U.S. Defense Investigative Service. It opens by calling “the occult explosion” “a new police problem”. It quotes Henry Lee Lucas: “I belong to a cult… it was a devil’s organization. For initiation, you would have to go out and kill a person”. It gives a calendar of “sabbats” on which “there should be a significant amount of activity”, rating Halloween the “First Highest Satanic holiday” and listing dates for “sacrifice”. It includes symbol sheets for “Ozzy Osbourne, madman of Heavy Metal” and “Kiss”, and an “inverted cross of Satanic Justice” said to be “often found carved into victim’s chest”. It also lists seventy-five “identity groups that share same ideas”, among them the Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations, The Order and the John Birch Society [Hurst & Marsh, Satanic Cult Awareness, #68641]. The reference shelf records that Kenneth Lanning of the FBI took part in a two-year investigation which, “finding no evidence of organized criminal activity by Satanist groups, turned the tide of law enforcement” [Wikipedia: Donald H. Frew]. The same shelf cites a 1994 New York Times report that “of the more than 12,000 documented accusations nationwide, investigating police were not able to substantiate any allegations of organized cult abuse” [Wikipedia: Satanic panic]. Tavris and Aronson describe how believers responded: “When the FBI and other investigators failed to find any evidence whatsoever… believers in these cults were unfazed. The absence of evidence, they said, was confirmation of how clever and evil the cult leaders were; they were eating those babies, bones and all” [#64090].

Organised Satanism Under Suspicion: Aquino and the Presidio

The panic reached organised Satanism through Michael Aquino. Faxneld and Petersen say that “though soon acquitted, he was for a short time suspected of so-called Satanic Ritual Abuse”, and they call the scare “a rumour panic fired by fundamentalist Christians and dubious psychotherapists” [#87532]. David McGowan argues the opposite. He cites medical evidence of abuse among Presidio children, the identification of the Aquinos’ home by a child, the August 1987 search, arson at the daycare buildings, and a court finding of “probable cause to title Aquino”. He concludes that the lack of prosecutions reflects a cover-up rather than innocence, while recording that “neither of the Aquinos was charged with any crimes” [McGowan, Programmed to Kill, #71652, ch. 3].

The Believers’ Corpus

The survivors’ literature rejects the sceptics’ framework outright. Fiona Barnett lists, as a tactic of abusers’ defenders, efforts to “label concern about, and investigation of, pedophilia and ritual abuse crimes ‘Moral Panic’ or ‘Satanic Panic'”. She alleges that in Australia “a tightly organised, mafia-style, hierarchically structured crime syndicate has infiltrated every aspect of Australian government and society” [Barnett, Eyes Wide Open, #68782]. David Shurter’s Rabbit Hole, with a foreword by James Randall Noblitt, describes torture “whether under the CIA’s Artichoke/MK-ULTRA program, ritual abuse, or satanic ritual abuse”, and asks “why so much time and money has been invested in discrediting satanic ritual abuse” [Shurter, Rabbit Hole, #73043]. Cathy O’Brien writes of “decades of MK Ultra mind control and resultant PTSD” and of being told “There is no such thing as mind control” [O’Brien, PTSD: Time to Heal, #69722]. Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler set out an alleged twelve-part “Illuminati mind-control formula” [Springmeier & Wheeler, Deeper Insights into the Illuminati Formula, #65326]. Kerth Barker claims that “MK Ultra’s real purpose was to take traditional Satanism and turn it into a scientific method. So it’s really the science of Satanic Ritual Abuse” [Barker, Cannibalism, Blood Drinking & High-Adept Satanism, #69929]. Leo Zagami’s section “Satanic Ritual Abuse and the Vatican’s hidden agenda” begins: “Back in 1984, allegations of sexual abuse at California’s McMartin preschool…”. He notes that FBI agent Kenneth Lanning held a 1985 seminar on “Day Care Center and Satanic Cult Sexual Exploitation of Children”, and he places clerical abuse inside a conspiracy aimed at “a One World Religion and a One World Government” [Zagami, Confessions of an Illuminati, #367409, vol. 6.66]. The reference shelf records, for the other side, a 2020 Dutch radio investigation in which 140 people described ritual abuse, and a parliamentary motion forcing an inquiry. That inquiry reported in 2022 that “victims are the only primary source reporting this type of abuse” [Wikipedia: Satanic panic].

Real Crimes and Documented Cases

Jimmy Lee Shreeve’s Blood Rites covers ritual killings that did happen. It opens with the torso found in the Thames on “Friday, 21 September 2001” and the hunt for “juju killers”. It also reports a sceptics’ group (SAFF) alleging that some who pushed the ritual-killing theory “were previously involved in promoting the now discredited” SRA scare. Its chapter “Satan Loves You” covers the Ruda couple in Germany, who believed “that the Devil was real and that they were his tools”. Shreeve writes: “I make a distinction between Satanists who kill or indulge in antisocial behaviour, and those that are members of the Church of Satan” [Shreeve, Blood Rites, #75608, chs. 1, 4]. The reference shelf notes that the 1989 Matamoros killings by Adolfo Constanzo’s gang “produced the bodies of 12 adults who were ritually sacrificed… but did not involve children or sexual abuse” [Wikipedia: Satanic panic]. Traian Tandin, a former Romanian police colonel, wrote Secte criminale (2008) on Waco, Jonestown, Satanist murders and Haitian vodou from a police perspective [Tandin, Secte criminale, #23557].

The Revival: Pizzagate and QAnon

Sommer writes that “QAnon’s focus on the concept of ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ can seem absurd, but it is not unprecedented”. He adds that “just as parents in the McMartin case… focused on tunnels, QAnon believers have their own special fixation on such secret pathways” [#69120]. James Ball says that “like almost every component of the evolved QAnon ideology, the idea of ritual or satanic child abuse conducted by secretive and powerful cabals was hardly a new one – even when divorced from the millennium-old concept of blood libel” [Ball, The Other Pandemic, #62315]. Thomas Horn’s Saboteurs promises “WikiLeaks Revelations About Satanism in the US Capitol” and ties “Witchcraft, the Babalon Working, Spirit Cooking, and the Fourth Turning” together [Horn, Saboteurs, #72784]. Pizzagate for Dummies describes Marina Abramović’s “Spirit Cooking” as “a mock-satanic ritual involving blood, semen and breast milk” attended by “the Podestas” [Pizzagate For Dummies, #78536].

Analysis: The Circle of Demonology

Petersen’s chapter in The Devil’s Party gives a framework that covers both sides. In it, society “negotiates values by acting on the side of ‘goodness’, illustrating the circular structure of demonological discourse” [Petersen, in The Devil’s Party, #87532]. In that reading the imagined Satanist and the self-declared one feed each other. Mehran Keshe gives a third, non-academic account. In KSW 641 he says that for earlier humans “darkness was the worst thing to them, it was their biggest fear”, and his summary states: “Inner weakness – fears are our Satan – lack understanding” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 641, #378353]. For Keshe, collective fear of Satan is something taught. The sceptics explain it through memory and interview technique, and the survivors explain it as a real conspiracy.

Key points

• The Repressed Memory Epidemic identifies Michelle Remembers (1980) as the book that added SRA to recovered-memory narratives, noting that Smith’s two sisters recalled no abuse [#53072].
• McMartin produced no convictions after years of trials, at a cost Sommer puts at $16 million. Sullivan says its collapse “most deflated” the panic, and Tavris and Aronson analyse interview technique and confirmation bias [#64665; #69120; #64090].
• Hurst and Marsh’s police manual (NCJRS copy acquired 1993) lists satanic “sacrifice” dates, heavy-metal symbols and far-right “identity groups” [#68641].
• Faxneld and Petersen say Aquino was “soon acquitted” in a “rumour panic”. McGowan alleges a cover-up [#87532; #71652].
• Self-described survivors (Barnett, Shurter, O’Brien) and authors who credit such testimony (Barker, Springmeier and Wheeler, Zagami) reject the “panic” label and link SRA to MK-Ultra and elite networks [#68782; #73043; #69722; #69929; #65326; #367409].
• Documented ritual crimes (the 2001 Thames torso, the Rudas, Matamoros) keep the debate going, though Shreeve separates criminal “Satanists” from organised churches [#75608].
• Sommer and Ball trace QAnon’s satanic-abuse narrative back to McMartin and older blood-libel themes [#69120; #62315].
• Across this Part, the Satanist moves from accused figure to self-declared believer and back to accused figure, which matches the “circular” demonology Petersen describes [#87532].