# No satanic network was ever proved, but the prosecutions were real

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  No satanic network was ever proved, but the prosecutions were real
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A memoir, a set of interviewing methods, police seminars and network television told Americans that organized satanists were abusing children. The FBI's

When1980ActorA mixed set of openly named sources: authors of 'survivor' memoirs and their publishers, some…Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  Content note. This page discusses allegations of child sexual abuse and the prosecutions that followed. Child abuse was real in this period and was proved in court many times. What follows concerns the claim of organized satanic ritual abuse, which investigators did not corroborate.

## What it said

The claim was that a secret, organized network of satanists was abusing, and sometimes killing, children, and that it could be anywhere. Geraldo Rivera's two-hour NBC special Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground, aired 25 October 1988, told viewers the network was highly organized, very secretive and that the odds are that this is happening in your town (as quoted by Mental Floss). It reached nearly 20 million homes.

The FBI's own specialist later wrote down the wider version of the story he was being asked to believe:

that babies are being bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that satanists are taking over America's day care centers

Kenneth V. Lanning, Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse, FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, January 1992, as quoted on the FRAME case study.

Against the 50,000 figure, Lanning set national studies counting 43 to 147 child homicides a year by strangers who abducted them.

## Who made it and why

No single organization ran this. The record shows a chain of openly named people, many acting from real concern for children, who passed one template along.

The template came from a book. Michelle Remembers (1980) was written by Lawrence Pazder, a psychiatrist in Victoria, British Columbia, and his patient Michelle Smith, later his wife, from memories recovered in therapy. Smith's father denied the account in Maclean's in October 1980, and later investigators found nothing to support it. Pazder is credited with coining "ritual abuse" at a 1980 psychiatric meeting, and he consulted on the McMartin case in 1984. In 1989 Oprah Winfrey presented Smith's account without challenge, according to the CBC.

Publishers and broadcasters widened it. The Christian publisher Harvest House printed 133,409 copies of Satan's Underground, a "survivor" memoir by "Lauren Stratford." Christians exposed it: Cornerstone magazine showed the story was false, and the publisher pulled the book in January 1990. Secular television did not wait for that test.

Then public institutions took it up. Police seminars ran under titles like "Occult in Crime," "Satanic Cults" and "Ritualistic Abuse of Children." Lanning wrote that many officers lecturing on satanic crime do not even investigate such cases and introduced themselves as current or former police officers and then speaking as religious advocates. He described more than 100 attendees copying a list of 29 "Symptoms Characterizing Satanic Ritual Abuse." The same mood reached games and music: Patricia Pulling founded Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons in 1983 after her son's suicide, and on 19 September 1985 the Senate Commerce Committee heard the Parents Music Resource Center, whose list of objectionable songs included occult themes. Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver testified against labeling as censorship.

## What it got right or wrong

The courts are where the claim met evidence, and it mostly lost.

- Kern County, California. Two girls, prompted by a step-grandmother and then questioned by investigators, accused Alvin and Debbie McCuan and Scott and Brenda Kniffen of running a sex ring. All four were convicted in 1984, with combined sentences over 1,000 years. A 1986 county grand jury and California Attorney General John Van de Kamp criticized the investigations. The convictions were overturned in 1996 because of how the children had been questioned.

- McMartin Preschool, Manhattan Beach. After a 1983 complaint, Children's Institute International interviewed about 400 children and concluded about 360 had been abused. On 18 January 1990 a jury acquitted Peggy McMartin Buckey on every count and hung on 13 counts against Ray Buckey. A retrial on eight counts hung in July 1990, and the charges were dropped. Nobody was convicted. The case ran nearly three years at trial and, by press estimates, cost about $15 million.

- Kelly Michaels, New Jersey. A Wee Care Nursery School teacher, convicted in April 1988 on 115 counts. The Appellate Division reversed on 26 March 1993. On 23 June 1994 the New Jersey Supreme Court held the children's interviews so suggestive that a pretrial "taint hearing" would be required before any retrial.

Lanning's conclusion, in a federal document, was blunt:

There is little or no evidence for the portion of their allegations that deals with large-scale baby breeding, human sacrifice, and organized satanic conspiracies.

Lanning, Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse, FBI, January 1992, p. 40, as recorded on the FRAME case study.

His test for investigators was short: look for evidence of a crime. In December 1995 Rivera told CNBC viewers he had been terribly wrong. In 1997 Patricia Burgus settled for about $10.6 million with psychiatrist Bennett Braun, a colleague, and Rush-Presbyterian-St Luke's, over therapy in which she came to believe she had been a satanic high priestess.

Two cautions keep this honest. The record does not show that no child in these cases was ever harmed, or that accusers acted in bad faith; many acted from fear for children. Ross Cheit (The Witch-Hunt Narrative, 2014) re-read the trial records and argues the "witch-hunt" account is overstated and that some cases held credible evidence of abuse. Lanning himself wrote that he believed the majority of victims alleging 'ritual' abuse are in fact victims of some form of abuse or trauma. What failed was the organized satanic layer, and the methods used to produce it.

## The problem began with state power

A private book and a talk show are free speech, and a free people can answer them. Cornerstone's debunking and Lanning's guide were the answer. The constitutional problem began when the claim was carried by people holding state power: prosecutors who charged it, county interviewers who built it from children's answers, and officers who taught it at seminars with their badges as credentials. A defendant facing the government is owed proof, not a checklist. The Michaels ruling turned on exactly that: before any retrial, a separate hearing would have to test whether the interviews had tainted what the children said.

The slogan "believe the children" worked as a loyalty test. Doubting one interview could be made to sound like disbelieving every child. Lanning described a debate in which you are either with them or against them. Due process is the refusal to take that bargain. Protecting children and testing an accusation are not opposites; the accused were usually day-care workers and teachers, ordinary citizens with no institution of their own behind them. Where the record is open to more than one reading, this site takes the side that asks the government to prove its case.

The PMRC episode is the milder version of the same pull. Labels on records were not a ban, and the musicians who called them censorship were heard by a Senate committee. That they were heard, and argued back, is the system working.

## Its legacy

The shape came back with new media. In 2016 users on 4chan read the hacked emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta as code for a child-trafficking ring run from a Washington pizza restaurant. On 4 December 2016 Edgar Maddison Welch walked into Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15, fired shots and found nothing; he was sentenced to four years. QAnon, from late 2017, described a cabal of mostly Democratic figures abusing children in satanic rituals. On 30 May 2019 an FBI Phoenix field-office bulletin listed QAnon and Pizzagate among theories that very likely motivate some domestic extremists.

The rule is the same with the parties reversed. A broadcaster warning of a hidden ring of evangelical pastors "in your town," backed by a memoir and a seminar checklist, would deserve the same answer as Rivera did, and so would a QAnon-style claim about Republicans. The difference between the eras is the channel: in the 1980s the claim ran through courts, social services and licensed therapists and put real people in prison; later it ran mainly through anonymous posts and named national figures. The questions do not change. What physical evidence exists apart from testimony? Do the "independent" accounts trace back to one book, seminar or broadcast? Is the credential being offered in place of the proof?

The United Kingdom had parallel cases, including Rochdale (1990) and South Ronaldsay in Orkney (1991). A 1994 study for the Department of Health by Jean La Fontaine examined 84 cases, found three with substantiated abuse in a ritual setting, and none involving satanic worship.

## Sources

- FRAME case study "The satanic panic: ritual-abuse claims in the US and UK, 1980-1994," for the chronology, case outcomes, figures, and the quoted passages from Rivera, Lanning and the FBI Phoenix bulletin.

- Kenneth V. Lanning, Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse, FBI NCAVC, January 1992 (NCJRS; Wikimedia Commons scan), pp. 5-8, 22-24, 29-32, 39-40 as cited by FRAME.

- State v. Michaels, 264 N.J. Super. 579 (App. Div. 1993); State v. Michaels, 136 N.J. 299 (1994).

- Washington Post, 19 January 1990, on the McMartin acquittals; Douglas Linder, Famous Trials, the McMartin case.

- National Registry of Exonerations, Brenda Kniffen; Reason, 21 December 2009, on the Kern County prosecutions.

- Skeptical Inquirer, "Michelle Misremembers"; CBC Documentaries on Michelle Remembers; Christianity Today, February 1990, on the withdrawal of Satan's Underground.

- Mental Floss on Rivera's 1988 special; Rivera's 1995 statement as reproduced by the Little Rascals Day Care Case archive; Psychiatric Times on the Burgus settlement.

- Robert D. Hicks, In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult (1991); Ross E. Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2014).

- U.S. Attorney's Office, D.C., 22 June 2017, on Welch's sentence; NPR, 18 May 2021; NBC News on the FBI Phoenix bulletin, 2019.

- UPI, 2 June 1994, on the La Fontaine report.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/satanic-panic-1980s/