Anton LaVey acts out a Satanic ritual for the press in 1967. (AP)
By Douglas Perry, The Oregonian/OregonLive
"What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around?" reporter Aaron Altman says in the 1987 Hollywood classic "Broadcast News." "Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. ... He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful, and he will get a job where he influences a great, God-fearing nation -- and he will never do an evil thing. He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important."
This is the most-famous dialogue from arguably the most-quotable movie of its decade. But at the time a lot of Americans thought it was off-base.
The Devil probably did have a long, red, pointy tail, they believed. And he did a lot of evil things. In fact, he did evil things all the time -- including inspiring the nation’s youth to horrible acts of depravity.
The 1980s saw what's been called "Satanic Panic," a nationwide phenomenon that led to dire accusations, horrific violence and high-profile criminal trials. And Oregon was far from immune to the sensation. Here we take a look at the Beaver State's battles with Beelzebub during the "Greed is Good" decade.
The Satanism hysteria of the 1980s had many causes, from conservative religious fears about the normalization of permissive values to a growing wariness of the psychic costs of a technocratic society. Throw in the arrival of cable-TV news, with its predilection for hyping terrible local crimes into collective national fears, and a widespread dread of the Evil One became unavoidable.
The 20th century's foremost advocate for pop Satanism was Anton LaVey, who spent the 1970s drawing attention to his own unique brand of media-friendly Satan worship, focusing largely on the worthiness of hedonism. LaVey wrote books and appeared on talk shows and hung out with movie stars, and so by the 1980s, his ability to shock was long gone. That meant, some people feared, that younger occultists increasingly were embracing actual demonic acts in a return to Satanism's truly evil roots.
Worried Americans started to see the Devil's work in almost everything, including horror movies and the board game Dungeons & Dragons. Most of all, of course, Satan could be found in popular music.
Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966. (AP)
Heavy metal is usually remembered as the musical genre that faced accusations of satanic corruption, but easy-listening fare faced allegations too. An early '80s news report pointed out that the Chicago-based group Styx, purveyors of innocuous hits such as “Come Sail Away,” “Mr. Roboto” and “Too Much Time on My Hands,” was “one of several rock bands [accused of] delivering satanic messages by a process called backward masking -- recording messages that can be heard only if played backward.”
Styx guitarist James Young responded by taking on the role of Dr. Everett Righteous, head of the Majority for Musical Morality, for the band’s 1983 “Killroy Was Here” tour.
“I always relate to the evil character,” he said.
Portlanders wary of the band’s message were spared. Styx ended up having to cancel its Memorial Coliseum date after Young suffered a hand injury.
The accusations of backward masking might have been silly, but that didn’t mean Devil worship -- sometimes deadly -- wasn’t happening somewhere near you.
In 1982, Oregon news reports announced, “state police in Columbia County found 23-year-old Delmer Anholt of Portland kneeling over the mutilated body of his 19-year-old girlfriend, Tara McCarthy, in a graveyard near St. Helens. In his first interview with Anholt, county investigator Dalton Darrick recalls that the suspect was ‘obsessed’ with his girlfriend’s pregnancy. He referred constantly to the ‘demon seed’ insider her and his compulsion to kill the unborn child.”
Two years later, Pendleton police tracked a “local Satanic cult of teenagers” led by a 24-year-old known as “Wizard.” They hoped the cult would peter out after the Wizard was convicted on arson charges.
Gail Lorraine Ray (The Oregonian)
1984 also brought the trial of Vancouver’s Gail Lorraine Ray for the shocking murder of her 6-year-old daughter.
Ray, known as “Big Gail,” said she held a plastic bag over her daughter’s face while trying to remove a piece of pepperoni that had become lodged in the girl’s throat. “I tried to get her to respond in every way I could,” Ray said. “I figured I’d put a plastic bag over her face and get her to at least gasp for air. And she didn’t.”
The jury didn’t buy it, quickly finding the woman guilty of first-degree murder.
Prosecution witnesses during the trial testified that Ray was “a high priestess in a Satanic cult.”
A 13-year-old boy admitted that, on Ray’s order, he had held down the arms of the screaming 6-year-old while Ray suffocated her.
Worries festered in the 1980s that California's "Satanic serial killer" Richard Ramirez would inspire widespread Devil worship. (AP)
In 1986, The Oregonian’s Northwest Magazine published the investigative piece “In League With the Devil.”
The report stated:
“A Christian counselor, who uses a pseudonym, has exorcised hundreds of Oregonians suffering from demonic possession, the influence of witchcraft, inherited curses of blood sacrifices or pacts with the devil.”
The exposé also told the story of the brutal 1984 murder of 49-year-old North Bend resident Darling Brachtl, who had seen five of her eight children suffer "strange and tragic deaths." Police found odd trinkets in her home -- as well as black witch costumes.
"And this wasn't any dimestore Haloween outfit," an officer said of the costumes. "It was very nice, expensive material."
The Associated Press
A growing fear of witchcraft led Eugene's Norma Joyce to speak out in 1989.
“I am a witch," she said of her Wiccan beliefs. "There is no other word for what we’re doing.”
The founder of Women in Constant Creative Action said Paganism increasingly was being confused with Satanism. She described her belief system as a “pre-Christian religion” whose guiding vision was, “Do what you will but harm no one.”
She said she had been frequently accused of Devil worship. In 1985 she had organized a Wiccan spirituality festival in Silver Falls State Park that drew unwanted scrutiny after two state police cadets reported that “some of the women were nude and engaged in sexual fondling in a ceremony associated with Satanism, witchcraft and the occult.”
Joyce insisted that she considered Satanism “abhorrent."
"Satanists," she said, "are a population of people who deal with negative energy. We are committed to providing positive energy to the universe.”
Norma Joyce in 1989 (The Oregonian)
Psychotherapy played a key role in the "Satanic Panic."
Cutting-edge therapists increasingly searched for “repressed memories” during the Reagan Years, and the surfaced memories seemed to frequently end up involving satanic cults. “The notion of memory repression dates to Sigmund Freud,” The Oregonian wrote in 1997. “But In the 1980s, it took on new, more powerful dimensions, buoyed by the feminist movement's emerging focus on sexual abuse.”
In June 1992, a Vancouver woman, Patricia Rice, “believed she was fleeing members of a satanic cult bent on killing her and her children” when she plowed her car into one driven by a Portland man, who was killed in the crash.
Rice said in a 1995 lawsuit that she began seeing a hypnotherapist for help quitting smoking but that the therapy led to “recovered memories” of “ritualistic satanic abuse.”
This, the lawsuit alleged, put her in “a psychotic-like state caused by the defendant’s therapy.”
Rice testified, reported The Oregonian, that during her flight from the satanic cult, right up until the crash, she believed she “was being guided by a ‘good witch’ speaking inside her head.”
Jennifer Fultz (The Oregonian)
Two years after Rice’s lawsuit, Portlander Jennifer Fultz filed a complaint with the Oregon psychologist board alleging that her therapist, clinical psychologist Sophia Carr, had misdiagnosed her “as a victim of physical, sexual and mental torture by family members who were part of a ritualistic cult.”
During Fultz’s very first appointment, Carr wrote in her notes: “Suspect she is suffering from multiple personality disorder and major depression.”
Carr’s therapy allegedly unearthed multiple personalities in her patient -- “in all,” The Oregonian wrote, “Fultz said she racked up 300 personalities.” She ended up in the hospital, where she says medication for depression and anxiety further sent her reeling away from reality.
Fultz's husband and children (Oregonian file)
When Fultz started seeing Carr in 1991 for problems in her marriage she reportedly didn’t know that Carr was developing a specialty in “ritual abuse survivors” and counted herself as a survivor.
Carr, in fact, had appeared on a KATU special broadcast about ritual abuse. “In a flat voice, her blue green eyes troubled,” The Oregonian reported, “she disclosed [on the program] that she was physically and sexually tortured at age 13 in the woods near her Bremerton, Wash., home. Carr said six men wearing medallions took her to an altar and ‘dressed up and did their chants.’ Before the men could cut her heart out, she said, the horse she had been riding returned and ‘scared them off.’”
Carr denied any wrongdoing. The state investigation of the Fultz case, The Oregonian wrote in 1997, “plunges the psychologist board for the first time into the murky waters of repressed memory therapy and, in this case, the chilling undercurrents of multiple personality disorder and satanic ritual abuse.”
Sophia Carr on KATU (Oregonian file)
Repressed memories had made a big enough splash in Oregon that in 1994 The Oregonian rounded up a clutch of books that zeroed in on the subject.
There was “Remembering Satan,” a study of a “1988 Olympia, Wash., case in which sheriff’s deputy Paul R. Ingram is accused of sexually abusing his children when they were small and eventually confesses to a crime he later says he didn’t commit. Other policemen were accused, too, of bizarre rituals that escalated as the investigation continued.”
Also “Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend,” in which a sociologist examines “how rumors of devil worship get started and perpetuate (through fundamentalist ministers, small-town cops, gullible social workers and lazy journalists.)” The Oregonian called the book “must reading.”
Other books included “Confabulations: Creating False Memories -- Destroying Families” and “Suggestions of Abuse: True and False Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma.”
"Rex Diabolos," an Oregon member of the Church of Satan (The Oregonian)
By the end of the 1980s, police departments around the country were taking “satanic-related crime” seriously.
Kansas City homicide detective Lee Orr became an authority on Satanism. He came to Portland in 1989 to lecture on the subject before nearly 200 Oregon police officers.
Orr described Satanism as a value system that was appealing to young people who believed society had failed them. He added that it wasn’t about anarchy -- there were rules, just like in Christianity.
Police officer and Satanism expert Lee Orr (The Oregonian)
“It's not a simplistic thing, a couple of kids going around with a spray can painting graffiti,” he said. “It’s structured.”
These young Satanists were a danger not only to the wider society but to themselves. He told of a 12-year-old boy who shot himself in the head as part of a satanic death pact.
“They think they'll come back, be reincarnated in a more powerful position because of their sacrifice,” Orr said.
“We don’t know what our kids are doing,” he warned.
By 1990, Oregon was part of the Occult Awareness Task Force.
Sgt. Lisa Wampole, a member of the task force, said there had been more than 300 “occult-linked criminal investigations” in Oregon and southwest Washington in the past two years. These included the ritual sacrifices of dogs, goats, horses, deer and even a bear.
In Albany and Roseberg, she said, corpses had been removed from graves for use in Satanic rituals.
Wampole pointed out that, rightly or wrongly, “It is legal to be a witch or worship Satan in the United States,” but crimes are committed when “followers of those beliefs begin to take things too far.”
Peggy Buckey, defendant in the McMartin preschool molestation case. (AP)
Nationwide, the “Satanic Panic” was driven by high-profile trials and shocking murders.
The McMartin preschool case in California, for example, riveted the nation. The school's director and various teachers were accused of molesting dozens of children. The children's accounts, reported the New York Times, included "being forced to watch a rabbit sacrificed on a church altar, seeing a parakeet squeezed to death, being taken on an airplane ride and being molested in the bathroom of a car wash."
After nearly a decade of investigations, headlines and trials, prosecutors failed to gain a single conviction.
Constanzo companion and fellow cult leader Sara Aldrete (AP)
Then there was the cult led by drug dealer Adolfo Constanzo. Cult members murdered more than a dozen people near the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 1980s. They reportedly believed their ability to tap into Satanic powers would make them invisible and bulletproof.
"The first part of Mark Kilroy to be found, four weeks later, was his brain," People magazine wrote of the search for one of the cult's victims. "It turned up in a black cauldron, and it had been boiled in blood over an open fire along with a turtle shell, a horseshoe, a spinal column and other human bones. His ritual death and dismemberment had been carried out in service to religion -- a bizarre, drug-demented occult religion practiced by an American marijuana smuggler operating out of Mexico."
Constanzo was killed in 1989 by some of the cult's members, on his own order, as police closed in on them.
Could Dungeons & Dragons actually have had anything to do with such depravity?
Proponents of the popular role-playing game said it was harmless fun that sparked the imagination. But conservative Evangelical organizations feared the game was a secret, sinister plot to corrupt American teens -- and lure them into Satanism.
A pamphlet put out in 1981 by a group called Concerned Christians claimed D&D promoted "homosexuality, sodomy, rape and other perverse acts of sexuality."
A few school districts banned the game from school grounds.
A Kansas preacher announced plans to buy up all of the games in the state and burn them.
Former Procter & Gamble logo
But some conspiracy theorists feared that Dungeons & Dragons was the least of Devil-hating Americans' worries. Satanists, they believed, weren't just wild-eyed weirdos you could spot at 20 paces. They could be professionals in expensive suits. It was even possible that major American corporations had fallen under Beelzebub’s sway.
Such as household-goods manufacturer Procter & Gamble.
The well-known company, broadcast journalist Jeff Greenfield wrote in 1985, “finds itself beset by a vicious, utterly unfounded rumor that seems impervious to attack. It sounds comical -- until you realize what it has cost the company.”
The problem was P&G's century-old corporate logo, which featured a profile of the Man in the Moon facing 13 stars. The stars represented the 13 original American colonies, but conspiracy theorists decided they actually symbolized Satan's favorite number.
The Satan spotters also interpreted the swirl of hair on the top of the corporate moon man’s head as a devil’s horn. Another series of hair swirls supposedly showed an upside-down “666” -- the “number of the beast.”
A still from the 1959 movie "Santa Vs. Satan" (Oregonian file)
Cheaply -- and anonymously -- produced pamphlets circulated in large cities and small towns, accusing the company of being run by the Church of Satan and claiming that a Procter & Gamble executive had confirmed this terrifying fact in an appearance on Phil Donahue’s talk show.
The rumors, though passed chiefly by word of mouth in this pre-internet era, started to impact P&G’s bottom line. Wrote Greenfield:
“We think of ourselves as citizens of a modern, sophisticated society. What this [conspiracy theory] teaches us is that we are not that far removed from the irrational, primitive impulse to believe the worst about an institution. Indeed, for some zealots, every step this company takes to prove the truth only demonstrates, in some perverse way, its fiendish, Satanic power.”
Procter & Gamble changed its logo in the 1990s.
All of this led to the collective panic that has been likened to the 1950s communism scare.
"The devil worshippers could be anywhere," author Peter Bebergal told the website i09 in 2015, referring to the way some Americans responded to the widespread Devil-worship claims in the 1980s. "They could be your next-door neighbor. They could be your child's caregiver."
-- Douglas Perry
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