Remembering Satan (2 page)

Fifteen minutes after Ingram arrived at work, he was summoned to the office of his boss, Sheriff Gary Edwards. An affable man with few enemies, Edwards was a rare Republican officeholder in a county long regarded as a stronghold of liberal Democratic politics. Ingram was not just an employee; he was an important political ally of Edwards and a friend for nearly a decade. In 1986 Edwards had appointed Ingram to be his chief
civil deputy, causing some grousing on the part of those who had been leapfrogged by the junior officer; but Ingram had performed well in that position. He was better suited to administrative work than to investigations. Like Edwards, Ingram seldom gave offense; he seemed cheerful and unflappable—qualities Edwards had in abundance and which he apparently sought in his staff. With his earnest, friendly manner, Ingram was the kind of cop who was tailor-made for public appearances. He spent much of his time in schools talking to kids about the dangers of drug use, although he continued to do traffic patrol as he commuted to and from work.

Joining Edwards and Ingram in that meeting was the number two man in the department, Undersheriff Neil McClanahan. Intense and ambitious, McClanahan had risen through the ranks even more quickly than Ingram. They had known each other well since 1972, when both were young deputies and shared a county car. McClanahan wore glasses and a trim brown mustache, and when he put on his tweedy rain hat he bore a certain resemblance to Peter Sellers in the role of Inspector Clouseau—a point McClanahan would jokingly make about himself. It wasn’t surprising that the careers of Paul Ingram and Neil McClanahan paralleled each other, since their skills and interests were similar; and although they were friends, they were also competitors in the small but still quite political hierarchy of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. McClanahan’s first action when he joined the other two men that morning was to relieve Ingram of the automatic pistol that he habitually wore in an ankle holster.

“Paul, there’s a problem,” Edwards said. He asked if Ingram knew about the charges of sexual molestation that his two daughters, Ericka and Julie, had made. (Ericka and Julie were then twenty-two and eighteen, respectively.) Ingram said that he did; however, he said he could not remember having ever molested his daughters. “If this did happen, we need to
take care of it,” Ingram said, but he added, “I can’t see myself doing this.” If he did molest the girls, then “there must be a dark side of me that I don’t know about.” These responses were disturbingly equivocal—a variation on the “maybe I did and maybe I didn’t” theme that police often hear from suspects who are bargaining for a plea. But Ingram went on to say that if the charges were true, then not only his daughters but also his sons would need help. “I’ve never thought about suicide before, but if it turns out that I have done something, I want you to get all my guns out of the house, just in case,” Ingram said, in a voice that sounded more puzzled than despairing. He requested a lie detector test, so he could “get to the bottom of this.”

“I hope you’re not going to make these girls go through a trial,” Edwards said. The sheriff may also have been thinking of the reputation of his department, although at this very early stage in the investigation the prospect of a trial seemed remote. In fact, until this point, Edwards had confined the investigation to an administrative proceeding, such as might occur when citizens complain about an officer’s erratic driving. An administrative inquiry might lead to a disciplinary hearing, which itself could result in a suspension or the loss of a job. It could all be handled very quietly.

Ingram willingly agreed to talk to investigators without a lawyer present, and so at nine a.m. McClanahan escorted him to the office of detectives Joe Vukich and Brian Schoening, who handled sex offenses. Both men knew Ingram well; in fact, his office was directly across the hall. Brian Schoening was a pale, sandy-haired veteran, a gravel-voiced grandfather with gray, unsurprised eyes. Ingram was the last man in the department that Schoening would have suspected of sexual abuse, but he had seen enough of the kinky underside of human nature to know that pleasant faces can hide appalling desires. Joe Vukich had met Ingram in 1976, even before joining the force;
after that they worked the same district, and Ingram had often invited the baby-faced rookie over to his house for barbecue and card games. As far as Vukich could tell, Ingram was a decent, easygoing family man and all-American husband. Ingram was both men’s superior in the department; so from the beginning the interrogation was uncomfortable and conflicted for everyone, including the suspect.

Several hours into the questioning, Vukich turned on a tape recorder to take Ingram’s official statement. Ingram now said, “I really believe that the allegations did occur and that I did violate them and probably for a long period of time. I’ve repressed it.”

Vukich asked Ingram why he was confessing if he couldn’t remember the violations, and Ingram replied, “Well, number one, my girls know me. They wouldn’t lie about something like this. And, uh, there’s other evidence.”

“And what, in your mind, would that evidence be?” one of the detectives asked.

“The way they’ve been acting for at least the last couple years and the fact that I’ve not been able to be affectionate with them, uh, even though I want to be,” Ingram said. “I have a hard time hugging them, or even telling them that I love them, and I just know that’s not natural.”

“Besides having a hard time being close to them, do you recall anything of a physical nature you may have done that could have been abusive, such as striking them?”

“Whew … I don’t recall, uh, striking the girls,” Ingram responded. “I don’t lose my temper very often, but occasionally I do, or—or they may think that I’m, you know, arguing rather than, uh, conversing with them. Those may be looked at by them as abuse.”

“If I asked you if you—and this is a yes-or-no answer-touched Julie inappropriately sexually, what would you say?”

“I’d have to say yes.”

“And how about Ericka?”

“Again, I would have to say yes.”

“What would you think the age of Ericka would’ve been when these things first started happening between you and her?”

“I can’t recall myself, but I know that the age of five has come up in a couple of conversations.” Ingram had first heard about the charges a week before.

“What do you remember?” the detectives pressed him.

“I don’t remember anything.”

It’s not unusual in a police investigation for a suspect to say that he doesn’t remember having committed a crime, especially if the crime is a sex offense. Oftentimes, the explanation involves the use of alcohol or drugs, but the claim of a faulty memory can also be a ploy on the part of the suspect to flesh out the charges—to see what evidence, if any, the police have. It was the experience of Schoening and Vukich that a suspect who said he didn’t remember anything was either avoiding the truth or standing on the threshold of a confession; so at this point guilt was the tacit assumption that underlay the interrogation. Ingram wasn’t saying “I didn’t do it”; he was saying he couldn’t
see
himself doing it.

Vukich turned off the tape recorder while he and Schoening attempted to move Ingram to accept his guilt. During the next twenty minutes, they told him that his daughters were shattered by his abuse, and provided him with some of the details that the girls had included in their statements. Ingram continued to be suspended between his statement that his daughters wouldn’t lie and his assertion that he couldn’t remember the abuse. He would later assert that Vukich assured him that the memories would return if he did confess (although there’s no way to know if that assertion is true). According to notes that Schoening took during the interrogation, Ingram began praying feverishly. When the detectives turned on the tape recorder again, Schoening noted that Ingram was
staring at the wall, clutching his hands, and that he then went into a “trance-type thing.” Ingram began describing a scene in which he came into his older daughter’s bedroom and removed his bathrobe. Then, he said, “I would’ve removed her underpants or bottoms to the nightgown.”

“O.K., you say ‘would’ve,’ ” one of the detectives said. “Now, do you mean ‘would’ve,’ or did you?”

“I did,” said Ingram.

“After you pulled down her bottom, where did you touch her?”

“I touched her on her breasts and I touched her on her vagina.…”

“What did you say to her when she woke up?”

“I would’ve told her to be quiet and, uh, not say anything to anybody and threatened to her to say that I would kill her if she told anybody about this,” Ingram said.

“O.K., you say you ‘would’ve.’ Is that ‘would’ve,’ or did you?”

“Uh, I did.…”

“And where did you go when you left her room?”

“I would’ve gone back to bed with my wife.”

By the time the interview ended, many hours later, Paul Ingram had confessed to having sex with both his daughters on numerous occasions, beginning when Ericka was five years old. He had also talked about having impregnated his younger daughter, Julie, and taken her to have an abortion in the nearby town of Shelton when she was fifteen. All of these statements accorded in a general way with the charges his daughters had made, although Ingram’s confessions were still maddeningly mired in conditional phrases. Brian Schoening, who is a talkative and emotional man despite his hard-bitten exterior, said later that he was deeply affected by Ingram’s detachment in describing the sexual abuse of his daughters. Schoening had never seen such apparent remorselessness on the part of an
offender, and it was even more galling to him because Ingram wore the same uniform that he did. Still, there was nothing very unusual about a community leader’s being caught in a disgraceful act. If the case had ended that Monday, with Ingram’s tentative confession, it doubtless would have caused only a brief sensation at most. In the ordinary course of things, he probably would have been spared a prison sentence and assigned instead to psychological counseling. His case would long since have been forgotten. But no one realized then where the hole in Ingram’s memory would lead.

At four-thirty that afternoon, Ingram changed into the Thurston County jail’s high-visibility orange coveralls and entered an isolation cell, subject to a twenty-four-hour suicide watch. Detective Schoening and Sheriff Edwards then made the dismal trip to Ingram’s house in East Olympia to tell his wife, Sandy, the news.

2
 

            
T
he Ingrams owned ten acres off Fir Tree Road, near the Union Pacific Railroad tracks. Here the brief suburbs have grown ragged as the town turns into the country. There are rough houses and trailers and an abundance of powerboats and four-wheel-drive vehicles in the driveways. Scarcely a mile away is a corner of the immense Fort Lewis military reservation, which occupies much of the southeastern portion of the county. Occasionally, during maneuvers, one can hear the sounds of a mock war, with explosions and machine-gun fire. The house, which the Ingrams built in 1978, was not visible from the road. Although later it would be laden with spooky associations (McClanahan would compare it with the house in
The Amityville Horror
), on that November evening it was nothing more than an attractive barn-shaped structure, nicer than most homes in the area. It had the makings of a small estate. Both Paul and Sandy had developed a fetish for self-sufficiency. Paul raised chickens, rabbits, a couple of cows, and even ducks in a pond behind the house. A small herd of goats kept the lawn trim. Sandy maintained a year-round vegetable garden. A neighbor described the property as “well used,” and it was indeed crowded with animal hutches and tools and a number of cars and trucks. For years Sandy had operated a day-care center in the house, so in addition to
the normal clutter of family life the yard accommodated a swing set and a sandbox, and the house was full of plastic toys and rest mats.

Until that Monday, Sandy had thought of her marriage as happy, stable, and old-fashioned in a good sense. Paul’s word was law, but because Sandy seldom disagreed with him, they almost never quarreled. She had her own life outside of the family—besides her day-care business, she had done a turn at public service, having spent one term on the county school board (in that sense, she was a more successful politician than Paul)—but for the most part her life was anchored in the home and the church.

Paul and Sandy had met in 1964, at Spokane Community College. Both were putting themselves through school, Sandy as a part-time maid and Paul as a janitor in a dairy plant. Both came from large and devout Catholic families. Sandy had spent two years in a convent school and had seriously considered becoming a nun. Paul had always attended Catholic schools and spent three years in a seminary, but he later decided that his priestly aspiration had largely been to please his mother. In any case, whatever clerical vocation he might have had melted away on the day he gave Sandy a lift to work. She was outgoing and full of fun, and they had so much in common. Paul was impressed that she was such a hard worker. Sandy also proved to be something of a tomboy; once, on a group outing, they went bobsledding down Mount Spokane on the hood of a ’48 Buick, and Sandy laughed at the wild recklessness of it. Paul had practically no experience with girls; he rarely dated, and was a virgin when he met Sandy. They soon decided to marry, though both sets of parents were alarmed and thought they should wait. On their wedding day, in February 1965, both were nineteen years old. They had known each other for less than five months.