The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (24 page)

The east Texas caseworkers said, based upon testimony that they and the Lappes had elicited from these children, that a murderous Satanic cult had finally been exposed. There were reports of ritual killings, dead babies, blood drinking and cannibalism. Eight cult members were now in prison awaiting trial, not only for child abuse, but also for the gang rape and ritual murder of a seventeen-year-old high school cheerleader. One of those arrested and incarcerated was the police officer who had originally been in charge of investigating the cheerleader's disappearance. Two experts on Satanism and a special prosecutor were on the case, seeking further indictments.

But now CPS officials in the state office began to wonder about the integrity of these investigations. They asked the state attorney general to get involved. The caseworkers' immediate supervisor feared that she was about to be arrested in retaliation for voicing doubts about the investigation. Her fears seemed well founded: the police officer who'd been accused of being a murderous cult member and subsequently arrested had incurred scrutiny and ultimately an indictment himself after he'd expressed similar doubts. Prior to that he'd had an impeccable record and had won numerous law enforcement awards and plaudits. Indictments were being planned for other police officers, sheriff's deputies, an animal control officer and even an FBI agent as well as the Gilmer police chief. Sixteen children had already been taken from their parents during the investigation and no one knew where it would go next.

Could it all have been a terrible mistake? Had innocent parents lost their children to a bout of Satanic hysteria propelled by poor investigative techniques? What had really happened in Gilmer, Texas? As soon as I had learned what had been done to those sixteen children—then aged from two to ten—in foster care, I felt obliged to get involved.

The main thing the state wanted me to do was to help CPS determine which of the children currently in foster care had genuinely been the victims of parental abuse and which had been taken from their parents as the result of false accusations made by other children who'd been led to “remember” incidents of abuse during the course of the investigation. To do this I would need to reconstruct each child's history. Fortunately there were boxes upon boxes of old records and hours of audio and videotape of interviews with some of the children and their “cult member” parents. Our clinical team started to put together a detailed chronology of the case. The chronology document would soon run to dozens of pages.

It had all started in 1989, in a tar-paper house surrounded by a collection of dilapidated trailers on Cherokee Trace Road, on the periphery of Gilmer. Gilmer is a small, east Texas town of 5,000 located near where the Lone Star state meets Louisiana and Arkansas. It is the county seat of Upshur County, an unremarkable Bible-belt community but for one fact: it has one of the nation's highest illiteracy rates. One in four adult residents cannot read. At that time, Bette Vernon* reported to the police that her then-husband, Ward Vernon,* had been sexually abusing their two daughters, aged five and six. Both parents were soon implicated in the child abuse, and all four of their offspring were taken into foster care. As a result of the abuse investigation, Ward Vernon was convicted of child sex abuse. Incredibly, he was sentenced to probation.

While on probation, Ward Vernon set up house with a woman named Helen Karr Hill,* who had five children of her own. When CPS discovered this liaison, they removed those children as well and Helen, who ultimately married Ward, gave up her parental rights. During the course of the child abuse investigation initiated by Bette Vernon's call, the children also accused their grandparents and their uncle (Ward's brother, Bobby Vernon*) of molestation, and his five children were taken into care. Later, two children of family friends would join them in foster homes, based on the accusations of the children who had preceded them.

In the course of my work with maltreated children, I have come across a number of extended families in which abuse is this pervasive; families that have harmful multigenerational “traditions” of pansexuality and insularity, in which sexual and physical abuse and ignorance are handed down almost the way other families pass on heirlooms and Christmas recipes. At this point I didn't see any “red flags” to suggest that child welfare caseworkers were acting incorrectly or overzealously. Physical evidence of sexual abuse—anal and genital scarring, in some cases—had been found. Corporal punishment had also left marks on the bodies of some of the sixteen children.

But the choice of foster placements was where things started to go terribly wrong. The children were placed in two fundamentalist Christian “therapeutic” foster homes, where two seemingly incongruous cultural trends of the late 1980s and early 1990s would merge, with appalling results.

America had discovered an epidemic of child abuse, much of which was real and deserved genuine exposure and attention. One of the reasons abuse was being discussed in the news and on talk shows was the popularity of the “recovery movement,” which had encouraged Americans to find their “inner child,” and help it recover from wounds inflicted on it by negligent or abusive parents. At this time it was hard to read a newspaper or turn on the TV without coming across some celebrity discussing her (or, occasionally, his) history of being sexually abused as a child. Some self-help gurus claimed that more than 90 percent of families were dysfunctional. Some therapists eagerly propagated the idea that most of their clients' problems could be traced back to childhood abuse, and then set about helping them dig through their memories to discover it, even if they originally claimed no recollection of maltreatment. As some people searched their memories with the aid of certain poorly trained and overly confident therapists, they began to recall ugly perversions that had been perpetrated upon them, even as these “memories” became increasingly divorced from any plausible reality.

The second trend was a rise in evangelical Christianity. Converts and adherents warned that the devil must be behind these widespread sexual atrocities. How else to explain the soul sickness that could lead so many people to perform such violent and profane acts on innocent children? Soon moral entrepreneurs made a business of the problem, selling workshops on how to identify children who were survivors of what came to be known as Satanic Ritual Abuse. As unlikely an ally of the Christian right as the feminist flagship
Ms.
magazine would feature on its front page a first person account by a “survivor” of such abuse in January 1993. The cover declared “Believe it—Child Ritual Abuse Exists,” and inside, the magazine told the story of a woman who claimed she'd been raped with crucifixes by her parents and forced to eat the flesh of her decapitated infant sister.

The CPS caseworkers and foster parents involved with the Vernon case were immersed in this cultural confluence at its peak. Around the time these children were taken into care in 1990, the foster parents and the caseworkers who supervised them had attended a seminar on “Satanic Ritual Abuse.” When the local DA recused himself from these cases because he had previously represented one of the defendants, the CPS caseworkers convinced a local judge to appoint a special prosecutor. This special prosecutor ultimately brought on board two special “Satanic investigators” to help make their case for the existence of a devil-worshipping cult, lead by the Vernon family, operating in Gilmer and practicing child sex abuse and human sacrifice. These “investigators” were reputed to be experts in uncovering cult crimes. One was a former Baptist minister from Louisiana; the other was a gym instructor for the Texas Department of Public Safety. Neither had experience with police investigations.

None of the material related to Satanic Ritual Abuse or “recovered memory” therapies had been scientifically tested before it became widely popularized. The “recovered memory” therapists and workshop trainers taught that children never lie about sexual abuse, even though there was no empirical evidence on which to base such a claim. They
also told adult patients who weren't sure whether they'd been abused that “if you think it happened, it probably did,” and that the presence of conditions like eating disorders and addictions, even without any memories of abuse, could prove that it had happened. The checklists for determining the presence of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” were based upon even flimsier evidence, yet they were propounded as diagnostic tools during hundreds of workshops conducted for therapists, social workers and child welfare officials.

If these methods had been tested, as they were later, the studies would have found that memories recalled under hypnosis, and even during ordinary therapy, can easily be influenced by the therapist, and that while many people have strong feelings about their childhoods, this does not necessarily mean that they were abused or that all of the events they recall are literally true. While children rarely lie spontaneously about sexual abuse (although this, too, can happen), they can readily be led to concoct tales by adults who may not be aware that the child is simply telling them what they want to hear. Overt coercion is not needed, though, as we shall see, it can certainly make matters worse. The “Satanic” checklists, like similar checklists that circulated around the same time for incest survivors and for “codependents” who had addicted loved ones, were so vague and overinclusive that any adolescent with even the most minor interest in sex, drugs and rock-n-roll—in other words, any normal teenager—could qualify as a victim. And any younger child with nightmares, fears of monsters and bedwetting could as well.

Another dangerous form of quackery was also being widely touted at this time and was unfortunately inflicted on these foster children. It came in various forms and had a number of different names, but was most commonly known as “holding therapy,” or “attachment therapy.” During this “treatment,” adults would tightly restrain children in their arms and force them to look into the eyes of their caregivers and “open up” about their memories and fears. If the child did not produce a convincing story of early abuse, he would be verbally and physically assaulted until he did. Frequently practiced on adopted or foster children,
this was supposed to create a parental bond between the child and his new family. One form, invented in the early 1970s by a California psychologist named Robert Zaslow, involved several “holders,” one assigned to immobilize the child's head, while the others held down their limbs and dug their knuckles into the child's ribcage, moving the knuckles roughly back and forth. This was supposed to be done with enough force to cause bruising. Zaslow's “technique” was picked up and elaborated on by a group of therapists originally based in Evergreen, Colorado. Zaslow, however, lost his professional license after being charged with abuse. Evergreen-associated therapists, too, would ultimately be charged in several child abuse deaths associated with their “therapy.”

“Holding” therapy was intended to go on for hours, with no breaks to eat or use the bathroom. Meanwhile, the adults were supposed to verbally taunt the child to enrage him, as if the torture being performed on the small body wasn't enough. “Releasing” his anger in this way was supposed to prevent future explosions of rage, as if the brain stored rage like a boiler and could be emptied of it by “expressing” it. The session would end only when the child was calm, no longer reacting to the taunts and seemingly in thrall to his caregivers. To end the assault he would have to declare his love for his tormentors, address his foster or adoptive parents as his “real” parents and display complete submission. The Lappes and a woman named Barbara Bass who housed the Vernon children used this version, improvising their own additions, such as making the kids run up and down stairs until they were exhausted and crying before beginning a “holding” session.

This is one of the many cases where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Supporters of “holding” believe (unfortunately, some are still around) that traumatized children's problems result from poor attachment to their caregivers due to early childhood abuse and/or neglect. In many cases, this is probably true. As we've discovered, early deprivation of love and affection can make some children manipulative and lacking in empathy, as in Leon's case. “Holding therapy” advocates also believe, in my view appropriately, that this missing or damaging
early experience can interfere with the development of the brain's capacity to form healthy relationships.

The danger lies in their solution to the problem. Using force or any type of coercion on traumatized, abused or neglected children is counterproductive: it simply retraumatizes them. Trauma involves an overwhelming and terrifying loss of control, putting people back into situations over which they have no control recapitulates this and impedes recovery. This should go without saying, but holding a child down and hurting him until he says what you want to hear does not create bonds of affection but, rather, induces obedience through fear. Unfortunately, the resulting “good behavior” that follows may look like positive change and these youth may even appear to be more spontaneously loving toward their caregivers afterwards. This “trauma bond” is also known as Stockholm Syndrome: children who have been tortured into submission “love” their foster parents the way kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst “believed in” the cause of her Symbionese Liberation Army captors. Incidentally, children's “love” and obedience also tend to fade over time if the abuse is not continually repeated, as did Hearst's commitment to the radical politics of the group once she was freed.

The east Texas foster parents apparently knew nothing about the potential for harm inherent in “holding therapy,” nor did the CPS caseworkers who monitored their care and sometimes participated in the holding sessions of the Vernon children. The ideology of “holding” fit easily into the families' religious beliefs that children who were spared the rod would be spoiled and that children's wills must be broken in order for them to learn to avoid sin and temptation. The foster families and caseworkers were convinced that the widespread abuse and incest in the children's biological families could only have resulted from involvement in a Satanic cult. Besides, the children had all the symptoms they'd been told to look for at the Satanic Ritual Abuse workshop. One of them even reportedly told a caseworker that “Daddy said that if we go into the woods, the devil would get us.” Of course, the same warning could have
come from a parent who practiced almost any religion, but no one considered this alternate explanation.