Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Satanic Panic: America's First QAnon

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

Robert is joined again by Jake Hanrahan to continue to discuss Satanic Panic. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's molesting children by the devil? Well, I said it was the devil. I mean, no one likes the devil except for people who like the devil. But this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that will very soon be canceled.

I'm Robert Evans, and I'm back with Jacob Hanrahan. Your full name isn't Jacob, is it? Yeah, I just called you Jacob. Well, that's what I'm calling you forever now, Jacob. Just change people's names like that? Yeah, I have that power. I am legally a Reverend doctor. Both reverends and doctors get to name things, Sophie. The state of New Jersey says so.

Yeah, well, the state of New Jersey has no say in somebody who doesn't live in America. I think the state of New Jersey's jurisdiction does in fact go across the Atlantic. It is a coastal city, so back to the Satanic Panic. Jake, how you doing? How are you holding up emotionally as we tear into this? It's so good. Yeah, it's the worst. So before we get into our main subject for the day, which is the McMartin preschool trial, we're going to talk about some other wild-ass Satanic Panic bullshit that was kicking off in the late 70s. And this involves a little game you might have played called Dungeons and Dragons.

You ever played D&D, Jake? No, but I've watched people play it. It looks really, really cool actually. It fucking rules. You know Warhammer? There's like a Warhammer story to do. Yeah, I played that as a kid, yeah. Yeah, we're doing Dungeons and Dragons once. I just went in and was like, wow, cool, man. Yeah, it's a fucking great game. Great thing also really good for kids.

Like, teaches you storytelling, teaches you... I learned a lot about how to do journalism well by just the way that you put together stories and stuff, what people find interesting. It's a great game. A lot of people disagreed with that in the 1970s. So in 1979, when the game was about five years old, a 16-year-old named James Dallas Egbert III vanished from the steam tunnels under his school. Which is where he and his friends played what honestly sounds like a pretty righteous game of D&D.

That sounds so cool. Yeah, that sounds fucking cool as hell. Yeah, man. His family hired a private eye to track him down, and that guy publicly theorized that James' love of Dungeons and Dragons contributed to his disappearance. This was not true, but the press ran wild with it. And while James was eventually found, he committed suicide shortly thereafter. He was just a very chronically depressed kid, like a very sad story.

Nothing to do with D&D, which was probably one of the few bright spots in his life. Right, exactly. Yeah, but obviously it was all blamed on the game. In 1981, the book Maze's and Monsters was published on the case, and it was just nonsense. It was followed shortly after by the 1982 film adaptation starring Tom Hanks, which is a fucking, if you want to watch a terrible movie about how D&D is the devil. Oh, I do. There you go.

Yeah, you're gonna love it. I'm writing it down, right? Yeah, Maze's and fucking Monsters. So the private detective who started all this published his own book, The Dungeon Master, where he clarified that D&D had nothing to do with James' disappearance or suicide, which he instead again blamed on chronic depression. But by that point, it was way too late. In 1982, another kid named Irving Pulling committed suicide.

Since he had played in a school-supervised D&D game, his mother Patricia sued the school and TSR D&D's publisher, blaming them for her son's death because, quote, he had received a curse during a game session. Oh, a real one. Yeah, and it is this like, you know, the kind of people who played D&D in the 1980s were big old nerds, right? Nowadays, it's gotten to be more mainstream, but like, you're a pretty big nerd in the 1980s if you're playing D&D, and you're probably bullied to fucking back, right? You're probably getting the shit kicked out of you every day, you know?

It was always like when I watched old American films, it was like the nerds would always be doing like a version of D&D. Yeah, so obviously like these kids who probably had a lot of shit that was tough in their lives, because it's fucking hard to be a kid and harder still if you're a kid who gets the shit kicked out of them by bullies, killed themselves and instead of looking into anything else, they're like, well, they played D&D, that must have been it. Right, yeah, it's got to be that, not the whole bullying. Patricia Pulling, Irving's mom, formed an advocacy group called Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, or BAD, you know, Dedicated to Securing Government Regulation of Role Playing Games,

a sentence that I could not type without laughing and can't read without laughing, like, the government needs to regulate RPGs. God, man. It's very funny, and like the Christian Right being what it is, you know there were people in the country who both supported the regulation of RPGs role playing games and also thought civilians should be able to own rocket-propelled grenades, the other kind of RPG. Right, right, and also like run a scheme where like,

Tarmanus has just had a bit of therapy. Yeah, yeah, it's fucking great. So, Pulling tried to sue TSR over her son's death, but that didn't work because obviously there was nothing to any of her claims. So instead, she dedicated herself to pumping out propaganda claiming that D&D encouraged devil worship and suicide. Her pamphlets describe D&D as, a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals,

gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination, and other teachings. Wow, okay. Well, it sounds like a cooler game than it was actually. Yeah, one of the things that's weird about this to me is like, the guy I played D&D with when I was a kid was like a fucking young Earth creationist. He was a great dungeon master and also believed in the world of 6,000 years old. So not every Christian had this attitude about D&D, but it was real common on the Christian right for a while. I actually found the cover art for one of the books that BAD put out,

and it's pretty fucking wild. The jacket quote, which is purportedly from some young fan of D&D, was, the more I play D&D, the more I want to get away from the world. And you might argue that this says more about the world that these kids were growing up in during the 1980s than Dungeons & Dragons. Right, it's like great escapism for them. So what? Yeah, your life sucks.

Your kid pretend to be something that's not a kid who gets bullied all the time, right? Yeah, of course you don't want to prefer that. That's a cool one. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so the book promises witchcraft, suicide, and violence inside, and is marketed towards educators, librarians, pastors, police, and parents. And despite being wrong about everything, Patricia was terrifyingly influential in both Christian media and among law enforcement.

Her books on Dungeons & Dragons were so popular with evangelical pastors in the US and in Australia, where she played a role in propaganda distributed by the Australian Federation of Decency, which is, I guess, a thing. And you know with a name like Federation of Decency, that you're the worst people in the country, right? Basically, like anything we don't like is devil. Yeah, exactly. So Patricia Polling eventually got a PIs license and became a consultant for law enforcement on a number of cases, all of which the police lost.

What? Yeah, she advised police officers to open interrogations of teenagers with the question, have you read the Necronomicon, or are you familiar with it? Oh, yeah. Fictional. Yeah, it's fucking great. She thought like H.B. Lovecraft was a professor or something like that. What she did, some decades after Lovecraft's death,

published a book called the Necronomicon to kind of cash in on the fact that number one, yeah. Well, it wasn't even a real book, right? It wasn't even a real book? No, it was like, yeah. So at one point, she told a newspaper reporter that 8% of Richmond, Virginia was Satanist, a figure she'd arrived at by calculating that 4% of teens and 4% of adults were devil worshipers. And the reporter pointed out like, well, that's actually just 4% of the population. If it's 4% of teens and 4% of adults, that's 4% of people. And she told him that it didn't matter that her math was wrong because her numbers were conservative.

Just amazing. That kind of attitude hasn't changed acting within a lot of right-wing circles. No. It doesn't matter. We know what we mean. Yeah, it doesn't matter. I feel that it's true. So like the fact that factually I'm just making shit up is fine. Yeah, yeah. And the fact that Patricia Pulling was clearly incompetent and wrong about everything and was still treated as a recognized expert by law enforcement for years

should key you in on a couple of things. One, cops generally aren't very good at their job. And two, in the 1980s, it was very easy to become an expert on Satanism as long as you were good at scaring suburban moms and cops. So all of this brings me to the centerpiece of our story today, the McMartin Preschool Trial. Now, this is still, again, the longest and most expensive trial in U.S. history. And I would contend it's also the very, very dumbest. It started thanks to a young mother in distress named Judy Johnson,

and her story is about as heartbreaking as it gets. She's kind of the villain of this story, but like it's fuck. She's a bad situation to this lady. She'd gotten into a bad marriage and she and her husband only stuck together because they had a kid. And then that child, their first child got diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor at age eight, which would like just destroy any parent, right? That's just going to ruin you no matter who you are. And she was not a super stable person before this happened.

Doctors were not able to help him. And so she developed an irrational but understandable hatred of doctors and medicine, right? Like it's not fair, but also like your kids, you're going to have so much anger over this that you're going to blame somebody, right? You can't expect someone to be rational in that circumstance. No. No. No one would.

And like a lot of people in the situation, Judy sought refuge in religion. She carried a Bible with her everywhere and was a very, very hardcore fundamentalist and generally the kind of fundamentalist you would expect to be worried about Satanism. Now, you combine that with the fact that she was kind of out of her mind with grief over a dying child and the fact that her relationship with her husband imploded, and you probably won't be entirely surprised at what she does next, especially since it later came out she had a series of schizophrenic breaks. So it also turns out she skits it like, it's a horrible,

like she's the villain in that she's responsible for the evil of this story. You can't, she's not morally responsible for any of her outcomes. Right. Like as fucked up as they are. She had a very bad hand, right? Yeah. Like it's, yeah. And she had a very bad hand and as a result, she creates as a result of that

and this cultural panic over Satanism and all of these different legal structures that have been set up in our society, she's able to do tremendous harm. And it's just a horrible fucking story. So Judy had another child, Matthew, and he was like two years old. I think when they moved, she and her husband moved to Southern California and they moved to Manhattan Beach, which is like a very nice part of Southern California. It's basically Santa Monica. It's like right on the coast.

It's a fucking beautiful part of the world. There's no parking though. There's no parking, but there was back then. It was a paradise filled with places for people to put cars in those days. And it had a preschool called the McMartin preschool, which was considered the very best preschool in Manhattan Beach. And like, so as the very nice preschool in Manhattan Beach, every parent wanted their kids in there.

And so Judy wanted her son Matthew to be there. Unfortunately, Judy was a bit of a mess and she failed to enroll him before the school was full for that session. Instead of finding another school, she dropped her two year old child off, off outside the school with a note in his backpack that said like, you have to take him basically like, here's his name. Like deal with it. Just dropped in there.

Yeah. Again, she's not making very rational decisions here because she's profoundly ill. McMartin preschool was founded by Virginia McMartin, who was in I think her sixties at this point. And Virginia was like, I don't think it's a great idea to allow this kid here that his mom has basically trying to force him on the school seems kind of fucked up. But Virginia's daughter Peggy was more sympathetic and assumed that a mom who would do something like this was had to be going through some shit

and that they should help her out because these are very nice people. So they take Matthew in and he attends class for a few months. And this proved to be a horrible mistake because by this point, Judy was not just out of her mind with grief. She was also a hardcore alcoholic and having schizophrenic episodes. So pretty bad situation, Jake. Right. All the red flag.

Yeah. I'm going to quote again from that book, Satan's Silence. That summer, Judy Johnson became preoccupied with the condition of her younger son's anus. In June, she would later tell the authorities, Matthew complained that it hurt when he made a bowel movement. In July, she took him to a nearby hospital emergency room where she told the doctor that her son's anus was itchy and that she thought she had given him her vaginal infection.

The doctor did not examine Matthew, but he did treat Judy for vaginitis. A few weeks later, Judy mentioned to her brother that Matthew's anus was inflamed. She began making frequent inspections of her son's rectal area. So a few things are going on here. One is that, again, not a great, not a very healthy household. This kid has bad hygiene, right? Yeah. Also, his mom is now daily poking and prodding his rectum in order to check it.

Right. And that irritates it. And she becomes convinced that the irritation that she is causing is the result of sexual abuse. And she grows convinced that this is because Matthew's teacher, a guy named Ray Bucky, had sodomized her child repeatedly over the course of the summer. Now, this is untrue. And one of the reasons it's definitely untrue is that,

number one, two-year-olds are very rarely sexually assaulted. Number two, when grown men penetrate two-year-old children with their penises, it either kills or severely injures the child. It causes horrible injury, right? Like, it's a terrible, yeah, yeah. It's not like something you would miss. Exactly. And it's not like it would be, it would not be something you had to inspect for.

Like the kid would probably need to go to a fucking hospital. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So again, her allegations are untrue, but Ray was kind of a weird dude. He'd spent most of his young adulthood as a California beach bum with kind of a well-off family. He smoked a lot of pot. He did this thing that California surfer dudes did

where he didn't wear underwear underneath his board shorts. So like he had people, one of the things people knew about Ray is that sometimes he would sit down and he'd see his balls. Like it was like a thing. Not, again, he's not doing anything like bad. Like the most you could say is like, hey, dude, maybe you should be wearing underwear because like people are seeing your balls all the time. But like nothing bad.

Just kind of a weird dude. None of the kids children he'd taught ever had any complaints about. And he seems to have been a pretty unproblematic teacher. I've never run across any evidence that he actually did anything bad ever. But he was a weird guy. And it was also weird in 1983 for a young man to teach preschool. That was a woman's job, right? This is still an area.

Okay. Like weird. Yeah. Exactly. Backward. Yeah. So just as certain people were suspicious of working mothers in this period of time and thought that like that was contributing to the breakdown of the family,

a lot of folks were suspicious of young men in childcare and assumed that they must have some ulterior motive. And Judy Johnson was one of these people. And her suspicion of male teachers meshed with her hatred of doctors brought on by the tragic circumstances of her oldest son to produce, again, all of these are like perfect storm things, right? Like that's the thing about all this shit. Like it doesn't just erupt out of nowhere. So I'm going to read another fucking horrible quote. Lately, she had noticed how Matthew would run around pretending that he was giving people shots as the popularity of toy doctor kits testifies.

This behavior is common for small children. And although Judy and although Judy hated medical professionals, Matthew had been exposed to them regularly that summer since his brother was getting hospital treatment for his tumor. Yet Judy Johnson believed that Matthew had no idea what an injection was. So she asked him if Ray Bucky had given him shots. Again, he said no, but she pressed. Finally, after repeated questioning, he told his mother that Ray took his temperature. Judy concluded that the thermometer must have been Bucky's penis.

Oh my God. Yeah. When you said shots, I was just picturing like a kid running around filling up like little shot glass. I was thinking like, he's a funny kid. But I realized you mean injections. Yeah, syringes. Yeah. Which is again, like I think every kid probably has a period where they play doctor and shit.

Like it's an incredibly common thing. Yeah. She becomes convinced. And again, when she first starts asking her kid, did Ray molest you? He says no. And that's the case with all of these satanic child abuse cases. The kids are always saying like nothing happens at first. Which is again, when we talk about like believing victims,

part of the problem is that people didn't and they pushed the victims repeatedly to like, yeah, it's very bad. So Judy calls the cops and she took her son to the hospital. And of course, the doctor listened to her story and examined her boy. And again, the doctor is like, hey, when adult men sodomize two year olds, it results in horrific damage. Yeah. And a summer worth of anal rape would be immediately apparent in a boy this young. And the doctor saw no evidence of that.

All he saw was evidence that Matthew's rectum was irritated in a way you'd expect if his mom was constantly poking it. The doctor was like, your kid seems okay. And he sent Judy away. This made her angry. And again, she fucking hates doctors. And so she kept like, she started going to the police next. And through a mix of coaching her son to talk about a stranger's penis and speaking for her kid in police interviews, which remember, they take the mom's testimony about what the kid said as direct testimony from the kid.

Judy is able to convince the cops that her son had been abused. She and the cop shopped around for doctors until they found an intern at UCLA who had never diagnosed sex abuse cases before. This intern sees Matthew's rectum and is like, oh, yeah, something must have happened here. And again, he doesn't really know what he's doing because he's not good at this type of thing. They're so fucked up though. Like the police were like, yeah, let's find someone to make the story true. Like it's so crazy. You know, cops.

I know, I know, I know it happens a lot, but it's just horrible. It's all so bad. It's all really bad. It's so fucking terrible. So the long and the short of this is the police open an investigation into Ray Bucky. And as soon as the word got out, people start telling stories about Ray. Not real ones, because again, he'd never done anything. But the kinds of stories people tell whenever someone a little weird gets accused of doing something terrible.

A week later, the police exacerbated this as cops are want to do by sending out a mass telephone request, asking if any other parents had been abused. And like the mass telephone request also has like, hey, please don't tell anyone that we called you about this. But of course, everyone starts talking about it. It winds up in the news and it starts spreading. And now what you have all these parents going to their kids and being like, were you molested? So Judy Johnson also keeps adding new stories on about her son's abuse. Claiming that Ray had forced him to wear a bra because one time her son had walked in on her dressing and said, Matthew wear bra.

Again, kids sees his mom wearing a bra, doesn't really understand things. And it's like, oh, I want to wear a bra. She interprets this as like, he's been forced to wear a bra by his teacher. And also, yeah, the day after this, she told police, so she tells police this. And then the day after this, she starts claiming, based on the strength of vague comments by a two year old, that Matthew had been tied up with a rope by Ray. So again, the story keeps expanding. It gets more and more elaborate.

And again, the very concept of investigating child sex trauma was new at this point. And the cops basically handed over responsibility to this case to the few folks on their team who had any training in this. And those people had been trained to believe that children never lie or make accusations based in fantasy. Again, that's the training too, in addition to Michelle remembers and shit. So the cops keep pressing the parents to ask if their kids had experienced anything. And the parents being people start to get excited about all the rumors flying around town. Some of them start to talk to their kids. And after badgering their kids repeatedly, those kids report what they think their parents want to hear.

Ray had taken weird pictures of them. You know, that sort of stuff starts coming out. Now the cops had searched Ray's home and found no photos, but whatever. Like it didn't matter that there was no evidence the accusations were out there. Poor guy. Like I must have been sorry about it. Oh, it gets so worse. His life is just shattered by it.

It's fucked. It's completely fucked. Satan's silence goes on to note that as this process went on, quote, Other children embellished their stories within days. Tanya Margilli had talked about being sodomized. And some of her classmates said Ray had penetrated both of their rectums and made them fillet him. They also named additional children as victims. But when questioned, this new group denied anything had happened.

The police and many parents did not believe the denials. They assumed that the children were keeping quiet about the abuse and they searched for telltale signs. One woman said she noticed that her five-year-old daughter was overly interested in her mother's genitals. And she vowed to question them further. Donna Margilli remembered that since the beginning of the year, Tanya had been plagued with vaginal infections. Until now, Donna and Tanya's doctors had attributed the problem to poor hygiene, possibly due to the fact that Tanya had been masturbating regularly since shortly after the birth of her baby brother. Now, Tanya's vaginitis seemed to have a more sinister origin.

Police detectives urged parents to take their children to UCLA for team evaluations. These goings on were openly discussed in Manhattan Beaches markets and churches in its oceanfront promenade. So again, this all just goes viral, you know? And these kids who all denied at first start being pushed into recalling abuse. By the end of September 1983, many of the children who'd at first denied any abuse at all suddenly started coming up with elaborate stories about what they'd suffered. Satan's silence goes into very good detail over all this. But to be honest, it is some of the darkest shit I've ever read.

For some reason, detailed stories of children being convinced they were raped by an innocent man is actually way more disturbing to me than stories of actual child abuse. It's just, it's so fucked, all of this stuff. For example, for an example of how this shit went down, a popular nursery rhyme at the time was, what you say is what you are, you're a naked movie star. It's just like some nonsense kids would say, right? There's a bunch of shit like that. We used to say it dipped dog shit.

Yeah, right. Shit kids say. Most people would recognize this as that, but all of the adults in Manhattan Beach were, by this point, fully off of their goddamn rockers. And the fucking police detectives had decided that children who recalled playing this game were providing evidence that they'd be sexually traumatized by Ray Bucky, because the naked movie star game they called it. Like, it just like fucking making horrible shit out of absolutely nothing. So as this all expands, these kids get sent to a social worker named Key McFarlane.

And Key McFarlane, for an example of her background, she's very involved in like the child protection movement. All of the stuff we talked about last episode, she's involved in like this kind of growing movement to try to like do group therapy sessions. When I told you about someone who was like, oh, I like these group therapy sessions because they're like, like public, like self-criticism sessions that like leftist political groups do. That's Key McFarlane. So she's that kind of person going into this.

And again, I think her motivation was good, but she is another person who does horrific damage. And her main innovation was that she had developed a series of anatomically correct dolls little kids could use to describe their abuse. Now, this could be a useful development for kids who'd been abused and were too young to verbalize it. But the problem is that Key used her dolls to make kids feel like they were in playtime. And then she would tell stories about the abuse she thought they'd suffered. And little kids being little kids would start talking about this thing, right?

Because they think they're in playtime and shit. Do you know, sorry to button, but one of the most ironic things here to me is that the actual child abuse in this case at least was from all the people trying to abuse the child abuse, right? Like they're abusing these kids by planting this stuff on them and putting them through this. Yeah, fucking them up probably for life. Like you can't go through this like repeatedly interrogated about the rape that like, God damn it. It's so bad. Nasty.

But you know what's not nasty, Jake? Advert. Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match.

And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Those ads were a lot better than manipulating children in the believing they were the victims of massive sexual abuse. Robert. That's what I say about what Sophie. Robert. That counts as a nice thing I said about the products.

Robert. Okay, well. Will Roberts still have a job by the end of this recording? So, yeah, so key McFarlane, we're talking, we're talking KMK McPhee. So she, she, she has these dolls and she. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to read you a quote to talk about like how she uses these dolls from right up by the University of Missouri Kansas School of Law. That's kind of analyzing this case. So here's how this all goes.

Parents were encouraged to send their children to CII, which is the place she worked at for two hour interviews. McFarlane pressed 400 children through a series of leading question and the offer of rewards to report instances of abuse at McMartin. Children generally denied seeing any evidence of abuse at first, but eventually many gave McFarlane the story she clearly wanted to hear. After the interviews, McFarlane told parents that their children had been abused and described the nature of the alleged abuse. By March 1984, 384 former McMartin students had been diagnosed as sexually abused. 384. By the one guy. Well, no, we're getting into that.

This starts to expand massively. So in addition to interviews, 150 children received medical examination. Dr. Astrid Hager, who was one of McFarlane's colleagues, concluded that 80% of the children she examined had been molested. For the most part, she based her findings not on physical evidence, but on medical histories and her belief that any conclusion should validate the child's history. Which is not how you do science. Not very scientific. Not good medicine. So to make it clear just how coercive McFarlane's methods were, I want to read a passage about her interrogation of a little girl named Tanya.

Long after most McMartin kids had been pushed into inventing lurid stories of abuse, Tanya held her ground that her teachers had done nothing wrong. But Tanya's mother eventually broke down on the face of all the other parents who'd grown convinced that their kids had been abused and she sent Tanya to Key McFarlane. Key McFarlane's technique with Tanya was much more refined. Before asking the child anything about sex abuse, McFarlane spent several minutes engaging her in fantasy play. Oh, froggy. McFarlane squeaked as she and Tanya manipulated a frog puppet and a toy doctor kit. I think you have a little temperature here. The two played with a banana puppet. Big Bird, Mr. Doggy, Mr. Dragon, Cookie Monster, Bugs Bunny, Mr. Alligator, Pac-Man, and Mr. Snake. Not until Tanya was deeply absorbed in the world of pretend did McFarlane present her with a collection of very special dollies in this little bag. They look like real people underneath. We can take off their clothes. Tanya then identified the dolls, wee-wees, chichies, which is what you call breasts, butts, weenie, and the Naga's hole or vagina. McFarlane proceeded to ask Tanya if she had ever seen a man's weenie.

Her daddies, Tanya answered. McFarlane was not satisfied. How about someone else? I don't know who else? Another man. Still, Tanya insisted she had only seen her father's. Well, I know some secrets, said McFarlane, and I know that you know them, too. You know what? I know some secrets about your old school. When Tanya still didn't respond, McFarlane added that she had seen the little girl's friends from McMartens, and they told her all the bad secrets. We can have a good time with the dolls, McFarlane coaxed, and, you know, we can talk about some of those bad secrets if you want to, and then they could go away. Wouldn't that be a good idea? Urging puppets on Tanya, she again asked if she knew bad secrets. Uh-uh, Tanya shook her head. Then maybe she could figure them out, McFarlane said. She showed off her secret machine and assured Tanya that she would feel better if she told it bad things about Ray.

I hate those secrets, Tanya finally said, addressing a bird puppet on McFarlane's hand. Ray Ray did bad things, and I don't even like it. So you see what happens here. Yeah. I was just thinking, though, like that poor kid Tanya, right? What a, like, strong-minded child, which is absolutely not, like, literally just pushed to the point of, like, admitting something that didn't happen. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, despite all that. Yeah. And again, like, it really has. The problem here is not that, like, you shouldn't believe children when they report abuse. It's that you shouldn't badger children who insist they haven't been abused into recalling abuse. Right. Yeah. There's probably me that's like, right, I get it. If any parent heard anything like that, you'd be like, oh, fuck, yeah, of course. Yeah.

But this is beyond that. This is like, literally that woman planting these ideas. Yeah. It's so bad. Yeah. And I don't like, I think McFarlane, McFarlane, like, had a long history of working with abused kids. Like, before anyone, before people even really believed that it happened, she was doing that work and she came from a good place. But she goes fully. I mean, like, what she's doing is evil here. Like, yeah, it's fucking vile. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now, the McMartin case didn't start off as a satanic ritual affair. You'll notice, like, we haven't been talking about, like, the devil in this case yet, right? But you have to remember that stories about other such cases, like the ones we discussed last episode in Kern County, were all over the news.

And Kern County was only, like, two hours away from McMartin. Both parents and students were hearing all this shit on TV and the kids are hearing this shit on TV. And as these kids are getting interrogated and asked to give more information, they start to make up shit based on the stuff they're hearing on fucking television, right? And also based on the stuff they're being told by their parents. And this starts with Matthew Johnson, who, again, his mom is the very, very sad story lady, who is very Christian and believes in all this stuff. And she starts, she starts pushing her son to tell stories of not just being molested by Ray, but by being molested by McMartin teacher Betty Rader, who was 64 years old at the point. And the more Matthew said, the more his mom praised him.

And she started to suspect that the McMartin school had been the center of a vast network of pedophile satanists. Because, again, she's profoundly ill and an alcoholic. By January 1984, Matt was telling stories of being molested at a ranch. And I'm going to read one of the transcriptions Judy made of her son's stories. And keep in mind, parents could enter statements they coaxed out of their kids into the legal record and authorities treated this as a direct statement from the child, because kids are also incapable of making things up. So this is the statement she coaxes out of her son, or at least says that she coaxes out of her son. Who knows how much he fucking said.

Matthew feels that he left LA International in an airplane and flew to Palm Springs. Matthew went to the armory. The goat man was there. It was a ritual type atmosphere. At the church, Peggy drilled the child under the arms, armpits. Peggy's one of the teachers under the arms and armpits. Atmosphere was that of magic arts. Ray flew in the air. Peggy, Babs and Betty were all dressed up as witches. The person who had buried Matthew, she said he had been buried, is Miss Betty.

There were no holes in the coffin. Babs went with him on a train and an older girl where he was hurt by men in suits. Ray waved goodbye. Peggy gave Matthew an enema. Staples were put in Matthew's ears, his nipples in his tongue. Babs put scissors in his eyes. She chopped up animals. Matthew was hurt by a lion, an elephant played. A goat climbed up higher and higher and then a bad man threw it down the stairs. Lots of candles were there. They were all black. Ray pricked his right pointer finger, put it in the goat's anus. Old grandma played the piano. A baby's head was chopped off and the brains were burned.

Peggy had a scissors in the church and she cut Matthew's hair. Matthew had to drink the baby's blood. Ray wanted Matthew's spit. You see what this is? Like this is a kid. It's nonsense. They're fucking elephants in it, right? Surely the police would have looked at him like there's no wounds. Nope. Why did she let him go on a plane with strangers if she was already worried about it? No, he didn't. None of this happens.

It makes no sense. She claimed that this was while he was at school for eight hours. They took him on a plane to Palm Springs and they were goat men. It's clearly like a kid being coaxed into coming up with fantasies and they sound like a child's fantasies. This isn't what happens in sex abuse cases. They're a very worldly elephant. It sounds like her fantasies. Not fantasy, but it's clearly some shit she's made up.

I can't believe that the police ever took that serious. Yep, they super do. Once the news broke that Satanists were behind the purported abuse at McMartin, other kids came forward with an avalanche of stories of devil worship, child sacrifice, etc. Kids talked about watching babies get murdered and all sorts of wild shit. One of the things that they would claim in this period, because this happens all over the satanic panic, is there's claims people will claim,

I sacrificed babies or I saw babies sacrificed, like all of this shit, and people would ask like, well, but there's no, nobody was murdered. There's no reports of dead people. They developed this whole theory that Satanists had a tactic of having children at home and not getting them birth certificates so that they could have babies to sacrifice that the state didn't know about. Like, yeah, yeah, it's, it's some Q and ony shit, yeah.

You had a Q and on the, like the most insane theory is that there's a video of Hillary cutting a baby's face off and wearing it, and it's like none of them have seen it, but they're like, oh, we know it's there. It has to be there. Do you know it's there? Like, I don't think you do. Because that would be like the only thing the news talked about for like a year if it happened, right? Like anyone thought that was real.

The FBI, I mean, well, I don't know, someone would be on it, you know. Yeah, someone would be on it, and it would be like the top topic of discussion nationwide. The world. Yeah, like, look at how much people discussed when Hillary Clinton fell down that one time. Like if she was killing babies, it would be huge. Right, hundreds of thousands of people know the video exists, but we're all dumb because we don't believe it. Yeah, it's amazing. So, yeah, it's all, yeah, again, there's no evidence of any of this stuff.

There's no evidence of any babies getting killed. There's no evidence of any plane drips to Palm Beach. But also authorities, the cops and the parents believed every word of this because at this point, complete mania had overtaken Manhattan Beach. Like everyone is out of their goddamn minds at this point. And some of it's understandable. Like their parents who legitimately think that there's a child rape epidemic at their school, that their kids were involved in.

Like nobody's thinking anymore in Manhattan Beach. Right, right, yeah. The whole thing as well, though, is like, I think the police... Oh, yeah. ...use on so many levels, but like the police kind of abusing the fears of parents... Absolutely. ...and just an incredible scale. It's horrible.

I'm going to quote again from the University of Missouri, Kansas, right up here. Judy Johnson's reports of misbehavior at the McMartin preschool became increasingly bizarre. She claimed that Peggy Bucky, Ray's mother, was involved in satanic practices. She was said to have taken Johnson's son to a church where the boy was made to watch a baby being beheaded and then forced to drink the blood. She insisted that Ray Bucky had sodomized her son while his head was in the toilet and had taken him to a car wash and locked him in the trunk. Johnson told police that Ray pranced around the preschool in a cape in a Santa Claus costume

and that other teachers at the school chopped up rabbits and placed some sort of star on her son's bottom. Eventually, most prosecutors would come to recognize Johnson's allegations as the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic, but the snowball of suspicion had been started rolling. Chief Kuhlmeyer's letter led to newt, which is the letter he like sent out to parents, to new accusations and demands from parents for a full-scale investigation of doings at the McMartin preschool.

Bowing to this presser, pressure at the district attorney's office handed a major portion of the continuing investigation over to key McFarlane. So... Oh, no. Really? Yeah. The frog puppet. It's a frog puppet, lady.

It's so fucked up. Oh, my God. Like the worst person you can be like, yeah, give it to that person. Yeah, give it to her. Let her investigate the preschool. The person whose job is absolutely not to investigate. Like massive criminal conspiracies. Yeah.

Yeah. Again, no physical evidence was ever uncovered of any sort of abuse or anything else illegal. The closest thing they had to evidence was that soft-core porn mags were found in Ray Bucky's home. Which like, yeah. Like what? You're like a young guy. Yeah. It's like the most normal thing that he's done.

Yeah, and they're like playboys. Like it's not even anything that's like you could say is like super raunchy, right? Right, right. Yeah. None of this stopped the case from going forward. On March 22, 1984, a grand jury indicted Ray Bucky, Peggy Bucky, Peggy Ann Bucky, Virginia McMartin, and three other McMartin teachers. These seven people were initially indicted on 115 counts of child sexual abuse. Two months later, they were indicted on another 93 counts.

The case had become a political issue for the DA, Robert Philibosian, who was facing reelection and thought that putting away some satanists would help his chances. Now, most of the McMartin seven were held without rages bails. Ray Bucky was held without bail. And he spends five years in jail as a result. In jail as a child molester. Which like just fucking. He must have got his. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, they just destroy this man. Yeah. Now, as the case proceeded, all of the McMartin seven had their homes searched. Nothing was found. By this point, children were telling stories about secret tunnels under the school and being forced to bury ritually murdered babies. And of course, since the cops aren't finding anything, a lot of the McMartin parents decide like, well, the cops have to be in on it because they're not finding any of the evidence that's got to be there. So the parents take it upon themselves to investigate.

Right. So we get, we finally get. Another twist in this tunnel. In March of 1985, as the case wore on, 50 McMartin parents showed up at a lot next to the school and started digging to try to find the caves under the school. Wait, literally digging. Literally digging. Yeah. And the DA, who again, wants to get reelected, hires an archaeological firm to help them.

Oh my God. And they're all certain that they're just going. Yeah. It's also just bizarre to like have people who's like, like people have job titles and training for a reason. No, they don't. Fuck it. It's the parents who are going to figure this out. It's like Scooby-Doo.

Yeah. So, yeah, everyone's certain that they're going to find mass graves and caves underneath the school filled with like, oh, that's where the evidence has got to be is the caves under the school. They don't find anything because there's nothing there because no one at the McMartin school had been a molesting kids, you know. Yeah. So the actual court case, thankfully, there is a period here where some rationality enters into it because the actual court case against the McMartin seven runs into immediate problems over the fact that there is no. Evidence that anyone's actually been harmed in any way, shape, or form. Yeah. But this is five years into a jail sentence for this guy, right?

Well, no, not yet. This is like through. Oh, sorry. Okay. The trial takes actually 28 months. Just the trial. And of course, there's years before this where all of this is building. Sure.

Yeah. He spends five years in jail. So again, there's no evidence at any point and that's the actual court case runs into the massive problem of the complete lack of evidence. But all of these people had already been convicted in the court of public opinion. And in fact, the DA announced, quote, the primary purpose of the McMartin preschool was to solicit young children to commit lewd conduct with the proprietors of the school and also to procure young children for pornographic purposes. His assistant announced that millions of child porn films of the victims existed. The media dutifully reported on all of this, even though again, no evidence of this had ever been found. Millions as well.

He said millions. Millions. Millions. Wow. No one was found. Not ever. Nothing ever. His assistant was toting some weird stat.

And again, part of this is the problem that is starting to get better in American media, but it's still pretty bad where the police say something and journalists don't investigate it. They say, oh, the police said this. This has to be the truth. That's what the police said. And it's like, well, no, they lie all the time. They're constantly full of shit. Right. And you get like any kind of bit, like the UN might say something or nail the police.

And if you say anything against it, people are like, oh, here we go. Conspiracy is like, no, it's your job to like question people in power. Yeah. That's journalism. And also all of these groups have lied on a number of occasions. Let me list them. It's not a conspiracy to say that people in power lie. Exactly.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's what you do if you have powers. You lie about shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So People magazine called McMartin California's nightmare nursery time published an article with the one word title brutalized like media goes whole hog on this shit. Not all of them. Because again, okay. So the authors of Satan's silence, which I've been quoting from our journalists during this period, and there's some of like the only people seemingly in the country who are like, this is nonsense. Like all of this is nonsense.

What is wrong with you people? And they like their book is published like right around the time that all of this like all these cases start to fall apart. Like Satan's silence is from that time. That's part of why it's such a good. I mean, it also is where I got all the background of like what set this up. I can't say enough about what a good book it is. If you want to understand.

Right. They did this job like. Yeah. Yeah. Very good journalists. Yeah. It's a good book. So yeah, all these lies about the McMartin teachers led to a lynch mob mentality within

the community of Manhattan Beach. Peggy Bucky was stabbed in the crotch by a random man while she was out on the street. The school was lit on fire and spray painted with graffiti that said Ray must die. Several parents went so far as to solicit the services of a hit man to bomb Peggy's car. It fucking is off the rails. It never stops getting out of control. No. It never like.

Yeah. They just like the first episode were basically talking about people filling a car up with gas and then they just put a brick on the brakes. There's no one at the wheel. It just goes fucking careening into the city. Yeah. It's fucking. It's so bad.

It's like. What a good tale to tell though. Like this is jokes aside. It's such a cautionary tale. Right. It's so important that people know about this. Exactly. It's horrific.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. I'm going to quote again from Satan's silence about like how out of control shit gets in Manhattan Beach. The fact that the accused were behind bars did not calm the frenzy running through the South Bay as parents and authorities pursued Judy Johnson's claims and became convinced that the McMartin staff was only one arc of a gigantic sex ring.

Searching for the other accomplices parents formed investigative squads armed with address lists supplied by CII which is what McFarlane worked at. They drove to their sons and daughters around to find molestation sites like the devil house which is like what the kids had just been making shit up and they were trying to find real locations that clearly weren't as the children pointed their fingers at homes and businesses. Mothers and fathers wrote down addresses and submitted them to the DA's office which in turn distributed them to more parents and are like hey we hear this business might be

involved in mass child sex abuse as your kid been near it. It's just like they're just firing a shotgun into a crowd basically like they're just shattering lives left and right. Like yeah right like destroying businesses, destroying teachers, destroying families. It's so bad. A father staked out nearby commuter airports and copied registration numbers off the tails of planes while reporting suspicious characters such as the female pilot who may be a lesbian.

Because again the kids are talking about how they were flown places. So like some dad shows up to like take down all of the in numbers on planes. Yeah. So is the primary besides word of mouth is this just like grocery store magazine covers? Is that what it is that's getting this information out to me? No major news and the DA's office. The cops are calling people and being like we hear about this happening in this school or this building.

So it's not just like tabloid it's like there's like credible quote unquote credible sources. Yeah. Yeah. Like fucking time is reporting on this shit. Most people trust time like you could argue time magazine actually a long history of shitty journalism. Right. But like people back then.

Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah. It's not like the national inquirer spreading this shit. Right. The DA's office you're supposed to theoretically be able to trust the DA. If you're like a random citizen you would assume that they're not just spreading nonsense.

But absolutely. That's why you shouldn't assume that. Can you take an addie addie break? Yeah. So if you know who doesn't spread nonsense about mass satanic pedophilic conspiracies that shatters the lives of human beings like a cluster bomb. I mean I'd certainly hope you'd say the products and services that support the show. That's right.

That's one of them. Fantastic. During the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. So I'm going to continue that quote about just how out of control things get. The paranoia was all-encompassing. One parent, Jackie Magali, who had a two-year-old daughter enrolled at McMartin preschool for a short time after the investigation started, came to believe that Ray Bucky had molested her child even though the police were watching him closely at this time. She also became suspicious about many other people, including a local newspaper columnist she was dating. When the two broke up, Magali accused him of sexual abuse. Later, she made the same charge against a worker at the Rich Stone Center where her daughter went for therapy. Her allegations never went anywhere, but were lost amid a wash of outlandish claims, including rumors that the mayor's wife was ferrying corpses around in her station wagon.

At times, people who spread these stories ended up accusing each other. One couple, for instance, threw a celebratory party for McMartin children and their parents the day the teachers were arrested. Later, there were whisperings that those two were accomplices because the rumor went their business was located next to the athletic club where Matthew Johnson and later other children said they had been molested. Yep. You just can't go anywhere at that point. No, no, no. Yeah, just any proximity to anything you're at. Yeah, because again, everyone's lost their fucking minds at this point.

Right. It's like collective mania, right? Yeah, exactly. It's a sort of collective insanity that's taken on here. Yeah. As the trial wore down, Judy Johnson broke down completely. Her husband left her and she, of course, immediately accused him of being part of a vast satanic pedophile conspiracy. She eventually barricaded herself and her children in her small home with like a pile of guns. She threatens her brother with a 12-gauge shotgun when he flies in from out of town to help. And she's eventually taken forcibly to a psychiatric hospital where she's diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Police who searched her home found a cache of guns and ammo, including a rifle under the bed of her cancer-ridden son,

who told cops that he would kill them to protect his mom. Because he's been like, they've all been... She's just finished. It's terrible. And yeah, I mean, he dies shortly thereafter because of the untreated brain tumor. And so does his mom. She dies from massive liver deterioration caused by alcoholism. Just a terrible, just a nightmare of a story all around.

Like, again, and she's responsible for a lot of this, all this starting, but also like, fuck, yeah. Just a fucking horrible, horrible tragedy. Everything about it's terrible. Like, ultimately, for me, I'm just thinking like, what the fuck were the police doing? They facilitated this, really. Yeah, they absolutely did. Yeah. But again, they're also not the smartest people, tend to join the police force,

and they're being told, they're being trained in a lot of cases that satanic ritual sex conspiracies are a major problem in America and an absolutely real thing. People believed this shit. There's a great video called Defending Yourself Against Edged Weapons, I think, and it's like a police training video that I believe was made in the 80s. And it's actually a pretty good training video if you actually want very practical training on like how dangerous fucking knives are. Right, yeah.

It's all about like knives are fucking horrifying. But there's a scene in it, because they like recreate a bunch of scenes where like cops get stabbed and one of the scenes, they're like busting up a satanic coven. And it's not like a joke. They thought that this was the thing that happened. It's fucking something else. So on November 2nd, 1989, after 28 months of testimony, the McMartin case went to a jury who spent two and a half months deliberating.

They acquitted Peggy Bucky on all charges and wound up deadlocked on Ray Bucky. Jury four person Louis Chang noted, the interview tapes were too biased, too leading. That's the main crux of it. Another juror told reporters, whether I believe he did it or whether it and whether it was proven are very different. Judge Pounders offered his own appraisal of the verdict. I was not surprised by the verdicts. I would not have been surprised at any decision that Jerry made. The judge basically being like, everything, like who the fuck knows?

Like everything is so out of control at this point. Nothing could surprise me. And that's kind of like, he says some stuff to that effect of like, I'm just glad to not be involved in this shit anymore. This is all like, I'm fucking out. So this, of course, outraged child protection groups and parents across the country, 500 people, including dozens of McMartin parents, marched through the streets of Manhattan Beach with signs that said, we believe the children. Good stuff.

But then they write all of their children's testimonies anyway. One TV poll at the time noted that 87 percent of respondents thought the Buckeys were guilty. In the end, no one was convicted of any crimes at the McMartin preschool, but Ray Buckey still, you know, spent five years. These people's lives are just shattered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a fucking. I mean, a woman got stabbed in the crotch.

Yeah, like it's so fucking fucked up. So bad. It's so bad. Yeah. And like the super fun thing, Jake, you're going to love this part. The super fun thing about the satanic panic is that the complete lack of evidence and the acquittal of all of the charged people and what became the nation's longest and most expensive court case did nothing to quell the public witch hunts. And again, they spent $15 million on this case.

You can't find a goddamn thing. While the McQuarran trial was going on at Kern County, which we talked about the end of the first episode, right, that first case, it erupts again into a series of allegations of mass child rape networks. The cases never go anywhere. And they're all hampered by the fact that all of the cops, lawyers and judges involved in every given case inevitably get to cry at a secret satanic child molesters themselves. Like they get added to the conspiracies.

It's like really fucks up the trials. Like now the judge is being accused. It's like the community loses its goddamn mind. Hundreds of innocent people in the ensuing panic get charged all over the country. Many of them did time in jail some fucking decades. Families are torn the fuck apart. An example of this would be the case of Carol Felstead. And I'm going to quote now from a write up on her case in the conversation.

In 1985, she went to her doctor complaining of headaches. Rather than being given any kind of useful medication, she was sent to therapy, which included hypnosis to recover memories of ritual sex abuse. She was given psychotherapy and like, yeah, she basically went through repressed memory therapy. And she started to believe that her parents had been the leaders of a satanic cult and that her mother had murdered another of their children and that Carol had sat on top of the body and then set fire to the family home. And like none of this was true.

What actually had happened is that like they had, the family had another daughter who was ill from birth and died in the hospital from a defective heart before Carol was born. But obviously her parents talked about it when she was a little baby and like those like that got into her head. And then wait, so she had a repressed a quote unquote repressed memory of someone she'd never met. Yeah, yeah, it's fucking awesome.

Carol falsely claimed to have given birth to six babies who were meant to be conceived and ritually sacrificed by the satanic cult. Her medical record showed that she'd never been pregnant. But she believes all this, all these memories that the therapist shoves into her head. She believes she cuts off contact with her family, changes her name and never ever ever like forgives or comes back to her family. She dies in 2005 in like very strange circumstances. It's just a terrible case.

And like by all accounts before going to therapy, she was fine. She was doing great. She was an intelligent young woman with a whole life ahead of her. Yeah, exactly. Like this therapist just destroys her and her family. Yeah. It's so sad. Like the whole thing is so sad.

It's tremendously fucked. Like the actual number of casualties of this will never know. It's probably thousands, thousands and thousands of people. Yeah, easily extending as well. It's so bad. In 1985, 60 Minutes aired a one hour special on the connection between Dungeons and Dragons, satanic rights and suicide. In 1987, two batshit Christian activists published The Catechism of the New Age,

an unhinged pamphlet that argued, among other things, that D&D was evil because it encouraged critical thinking in children, which inevitably led to heresy of the devil. Critical thinking. All the kids have that. And of course, heavy metal music gets demonized in this period too, right? And obviously, being good marketers, a lot of heavy metal musicians lean into this

and specifically start doing devil stuff in their songs. And their teenage counter-cultural fans do this as well. And this sometimes ends in tragedy because a lot of these kids, they're just doing it to be like, fuck the man. Like the Satanism. Yeah, edgy. Yeah, exactly. But also, it makes them suspects and murders,

which is what happened in the 1993 case of the West Memphis Three. Have you ever heard of this case? Of course, yeah. Real bad. Bad situation, yeah. Yeah. On May 5th of that year, eight-year-old Christopher Byers went missing with two of his friends.

The boys were found murdered shortly thereafter, hog-tied with their own shoelaces. One appeared to have his genitals cut off. I mean, obviously, this is an actual horrific crime that was committed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was immediately put down to satanic ritual activity. Three teenagers were quickly accused of the crime based largely on the strength of the fact that they'd been arrested

for vandalism and liked heavy metal. And the whole case was a complete shit show. So, for one thing, the police department that is investigating this case is not just wildly incompetent. It was actively being investigated for stealing drugs from another police department. Really?

Yeah. No. Yeah, the West Memphis police are not a good department. Just stealing them from the police. From other cops, yeah. How bad is it that, man? So, the cops never secured the crime scene. They did not properly investigate the crime scene.

And the coroner was incompetent because he believed and reported that the kid's genitals had been cut off as part of a ritual. And the reality is that it was a decomposing body that got eaten by animals, right? And the later competent coroners were like, this is clearly what happened to the body after death. So, the police, in order to find the culprits, rather than investigating, because again,

terrible police department, they go to a local juvenile psychiatrist and ask like, hey, what kids do you think did this? Right. Okay. Find us a victim. Yeah. Who do we arrest for this?

We are so tired from stealing all these drugs from the cops next door. We really don't have any time to look into this shit. Right. Can you do a job, please? So, the psychiatrist blames a kid named Damien Eccles. Now, Eccles was 18 at the time, and he's the kind of kid. Unfortunate name.

Yeah. Damien. Yeah. It is a real, it's a problem. And again, his town is like a hardcore religious fundamentalist. It's fucking West Memphis in the 80s. And he wore all black and listened to heavy metal music. He read Stephen King books.

He was interested in the occult. So, he had like books on the occult and shit in his house. And he had mental health issues. He'd spent time in a mental institution, which is why the psychiatrist knew this kid was out here. And the psychiatrist doing exactly what psychiatrists should never do, blames him for the crime, and soon so to the police. Yeah.

They wind up wrapping up a friend of Eccles in it, Jason Baldwin, who was 16 and was like a good student who had no history of trouble. He, but was also a fan of like heavy metal. Like they, and they drew scenes from like Metallica and Slayer and Iron Maiden songs. And like teachers found them. And so like, oh, these kids are like, it's the devil. Yeah. And they'd both been arrested for vandalism and shoplifting,

but like nothing violent. Like never an actual crime. He's a teenage. Yeah. They're fucking teenagers. Yeah. Yeah. It's real bad.

And basically in order to convict these kids, the West Memphis police found a mentally disabled 17 year old with an IQ of 72, who knew both kids, and they bribe his poor family with like lies about reward money. That if he like, well, like, they're talking to him about like, oh yeah, once you get these kids convicted, you'll be able to buy a truck and stuff like that. Like it's unbelievably fucked up. Yeah. Yeah.

And so they question this, the family agrees with him, question this mentally ill kid who has no tie to this, and the police question for 12 hours with no parent, no lawyer, no child advocate with him. And he confesses eventually that he eckles and Baldwin killed the kids, even though his co, like as a clearly coerced confession that's frequently wrong and includes facts that weren't part of like the physical evidence. And he immediately recants, but it doesn't fucking matter. Because all three of these kids get fucking convicted.

And it's, it's, I mean, like now law enforcement's pretty certain that it would, they were like those kids who were murdered were killed by a single person, probably an adult. But yeah. 12 hours. Yeah. I remember once reading something that really made me think, yeah, someone said like deep lung interrogations like that without break. Yeah.

It's like being waterboarded with dial. It is. Do you know what I mean? And it's like, I remember thinking that's such a good way of putting it. Waterboarding with dialogue. Yeah. It's a nightmare. So Damien Eccles gets sentenced to death.

Jesse Miss Kelly gets sentenced to life imprisonment plus two 20 year sentences. And Jason Baldwin gets sentenced to life imprisonment. And yeah, the, the prosecution basically claims like this is part of a devil ritual that the kids were doing. Like that's part of the case. And obviously like there was never any hard physical evidence. And in fact, in 2007, new evidence comes out that finds like genetic material of someone who's not any of the three victims around the bodies of the victims and was not any of the defendants either. Which, you know, anyway, the case, they peel and shit.

And like the case winds up, it takes until again, this happens in 1993. It's not until 2010 that the people in the case are able to negotiate a plea bargain. Like they don't even get declared innocent, like what you would think. Instead, they have to enter an Alfred plea in which they assert their innocence, but also acknowledge that the prosecutors had enough evidence to convict them. And they get sentenced to time served, both having served like 18 years or all having. So yeah, it's. So right, that's a lifetime, you know. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's horrible. It's horrible. It's a horrible, horrible story, Jake. The thing is as well, yeah, like this sounds dumb. But I was just thinking like now if a real satanic group came out, they could just be like, no one's going to believe that we did this. After satanic panic, they'd be like, it's fine, we better wait with it. Or let's say in that it would probably create a news. Yeah.

I mean, all right, listen up, devil worshipers. You've got a window here. No, no, don't say that. Jake Henry Han says, start committing crimes. Now, Jake, this has all been a real bummer. Just not a great time. And I want to end on something that is at least kind of funny. One of the major spreaders of the satanic panic, one of like the people who was responsible nationwide for getting a lot of this nonsense out, was friend of the pod, Oprah Winfrey, who, boy, howdy, had a lot of people on to say, to tell lurid lies about the things they'd supposedly done.

But during one of these times, she actually had a member of the Church of Satan on her show. And a guy in the audience started claiming that he had been a satanist and had like murdered somebody as part of a satanic ritual. And you actually, this guy got cross-examined by the satanist that Oprah had on stage. And it's fucking great. And I'm going to send you that video now. We're going to end on that note because it's actually kind of funny. It's very, very funny. So what happened in the ritual where someone was murdered?

And how were they murdered? They were stabbed seven times with knives because... In Chicago? Yes. It was... What year? About eight years ago. So it was about 80, 81.

And the ritual was a witch's Sabbath. And it got out of hand. And the high priest brought out these seven daggers. And they impaled him in the form of a cross with the seven daggers. Was this person impaled against his or her will? Yes. Or do they want wish to be sacrificed? No, this was against his will.

So how did you know you weren't going to be pulled in and impaled? That's one of the reasons why I got out of the church. And the other reason why I got out of the church was mentally I had a nervous breakdown after that. And I just mentally could not handle it. How do you explain that? My first question would be, were you a member of the Church of Satan, a card carrying member of the Church of Satan? Yes, sir. And who was the grotto leader?

I don't remember his name. You don't remember the name of a person who involved you in murder? Not anymore, I know. Were you prosecuted? Like I said, I had a nervous breakdown. And I have partial amnesia. Man, that is excellent. I gave him a car to say what actually.

And the guy that is cost-examining looks like Dracula. He absolutely looks like Dracula. And he's like, no, this is stupid. And he's very methodical and lawyerly about how he cuts that guy's claims apart. It fucking is great. So Jake, how do you feel about the devil? I don't know. I just shower now, I think, like a long one.

After all that, it's pretty grim. But again, like I said before, all of that is very interesting. And there are some groups around. But again, this stuff just makes it all look stupid. And God knows how many horrible crimes slipped through the cracks. You know what I mean? Or maybe Will. I don't know.

It's just so outrageous that that kind of hysteria took over through the police as well. It's outrageous. But you know what I'm saying? It's just another thing of just like, wow, great job, guys. You can find there are some cases of like ritual murders, like we talked about at the start. Very few. Very few. It is a thing that has happened in history in this country and in other countries.

Like it's not a thing that never occurs. But it's not what they claimed it was, right? There's no gigantic international network of Satanists murdering children for devil powers. Yeah, and often the occult stuff is actually nothing to do with the devil. Actually, there's very few actual Satan worship. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.

And most Satanists aren't Satan worshipers because it usually means something completely different to them than like the. Yeah. Yeah. Or yeah, I mean, there's our, yeah, there's a bunch of different. Like I don't want to like, I've known Satanists who like spoke pretty eloquently about like why they called themselves that. And it wasn't like a worship the devil thing. It was like, yeah, but yeah. Yeah.

Some abstract metaphor or whatever. Yeah, it's fine. I mean, it's, I think the best thing about this and like, like, you know, when you were talking about us thinking, man, I don't want to hear this. And that made me think like, yeah, that's really why you should have to hear this. Do you know what I mean? It's such a demonstration of mass hysteria and not even failure, but like almost like the authorities are trying to make it worse. It was so bad. Yeah.

And the idea that won't happen again, like, oh, it happened. Oh, that can happen anytime. Yeah. It'll happen anytime. There's really shades of this every time. Like there's shades of this and sort of the panic that was erupting over Antifa earlier. There's going to be shades of it in the Boogaloo stuff. There's going to be shades of it in, I mean, QAnon is not just shades of it.

QAnon's the descendant of it, but like, yeah. Several shades of shit. Yeah. Yeah. It never, like it's the kind of thing. There's a bunch of things. If you're a responsible member of society or a responsible society, you always have to be on guard for fascism is one of them. You know, witch hunts are another.

This is what it is, right? Yeah. It's a modern day witch hunt, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Like almost. I mean, this was a literal witch hunt. They were looking for witches.

Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. I never knew how bad it got, you know. Unreal. How many people? Like you're talking about probably somewhere around a thousand people harmed one way or the other by just the making of the case, right?

Right. Like almost 400 kids, but like also like all these business people, family members. It's just a nightmare. God knows what problems those kids have in their lives now as well. Jesus. They're kind of abused by the authority, man. Yeah. If you're a, if you were a McMartin kid who like went through all this, like hit us up.

I'm really curious about like. Right. Yeah. Uh, so Jake, you want to plug things? Yeah, man. Definitely. Um, people should definitely listen to the new one. Uh, Hugh Clarence basically trying to, trying to bring everyone together to kind of put the

story of put chewing on together, but at the same time kind of be like, you know, by the end of the day, you want to be like, this is absolutely who we think it is. And here's why, you know what I'm saying? Um, and yeah, we're so popular friends. No, my platform is independent. So there's just a popular front and you'll find it all. Yeah. Check it out.

Check out Jake's new podcast. Check out Jake's old podcast. Find Jake on the street. No, don't do that. Podcasts. We're done. Alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside this house was like a lot of goods, but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get a podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in

a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.