Uncover - S6 "Satanic Panic" E7: What good can come of this?

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

Far from healed, the Martensville Nightmare remains an open wound for those who lived through it. And yet for the rest of us, the history is all but lost — a symbol of the broader failure across the board to face the effects of the Satanic Panic head on or to learn its lessons. But, some surprising good did emerge out of all the pain. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/uncover/uncover-season-6-satanic-panic-transcripts-listen-1.5437487

Hey there, I'm Elamin Abdelmahmoud. I am the host of Commotion. You know when there's that thing that's like all over your social feeds, or maybe a new movie or a show on Netflix that everyone is talking about, or maybe your favorite artist just dropped a new song or new album. These are the moments when I love to gather the smartest, funniest people together. We get them in the group chat, and then we dig into the culture that is all around us. And commotion does this every single day. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Oh, hi, is this Linda?

One of the first calls I made as we started this podcast was to Linda Sterling, the woman who ran the daycare out of the powder blue bungalow she shared with her husband, Ron, and son, Travis. Oh, hi. My name is Lisa Rundle, and I'm a producer at CBC. How are you? Out of some kind of automatic politeness, maybe, Linda didn't hang up. But she didn't want to talk. Yeah, we just talked to Linda Sterling. She's asked us not to use the audio, so you're not going to hear it. But I can say that she was just audibly very upset. incredibly very upset as soon as I mentioned the word Martinsville. She was quite overcome and, you know, could not understand why we would dredge it up.

I'm debriefing with my producer, Alina, right after the call. We're both a bit shaken. I certainly seemed to feel that it would cause a lot of pain and you know I talked to her about what I thought the you know why I think it's important why I'm doing this and and in part I did that because she asked me out right why would you do this and I actually think that's a really important question but what I'm also aware of is that sometimes what's in the public interest is not in the interest of the people at the center of the story. And it's one of the hardest parts of this job is to balance those things.

But I know that I need to have a really good answer to that question to make sure that we are doing the right thing. Her question would continue to echo in my mind as I worked on this series. Pleading and accusatory at the same time. What good can come of this? I have been traumatized, but it wasn't by my preschool. It was by the social hysteria. And then they took me to a temporary foster home in the city and left me there. And I remember not knowing if I was ever going home again. Man, that was the worst day of my life. I'm accused of the worst things that a human being can be accused of.

Because everybody was involved in it. This was the fight between good and evil. I was on the side of good. I feel like now is a good time. He said the police and parents were guided by their evil. The day that these are the charges are going to follow us, no matter where we go or what we do. I'm Lisa Bryn-Rundle, and this is Uncover Satanic Panic. The final episode. What good can come of this? The Martinsville Civic Center is a modest, welcoming place.

Not unlike the town itself. The Martinsville Civic Center is a modest, welcoming place. Not unlike the town itself. It houses the public library, a preschool, and the new Martinsville Historical Center. The Historical Center occupies a crowded couple of rooms hung with old town plans, aerial shots and brief biographies of founding families. In one of them, I spot Samantha Lowen's beloved grandmother. The one who'd been expecting her home from school the day a social worker showed up and drove Samantha away. So you're doing something on Martinsville, are you? The center's run by local history buff Terry Hederle. I'm president of the Martinsville Historical Center, and I've lived here since 1997.

Okay, so you came after. Yeah, it was after. If you look at the population stats, Martinsville was growing at quite a sharp curve, and then all of a sudden it plateaued, and then it started again about when I moved here in 1997. So, you know, it was tough for people to know what was real, what wasn't, from what I've heard. So, yeah, it was a very, very difficult time in our community.

Roughly a year after the night of high alert that had the town bracing for chaos, the Martinsville Municipal Police Service was shut down for good. It became a very difficult time. Randy Chudak, the police officer who'd planned to spend the rest of his career there,

had the job of closing its doors. It shouldn't have happened the way it happened. But then the town moved on. The population has nearly tripled

in the 30 years since the Martinsville nightmare. I wouldn't move away. I love it here. It's growing very quickly. And as far as the community is concerned, the nightmare isn't what defines Martinsville. It's not something that is talked about on any regular basis. It's not something that, you know, is talked about on any regular basis. It's not something that people dwell on. In fact, if you moved there after, there's a decent chance you've never even heard of the Martensville Nightmare. But it is a part of this place. Innocent or not, I don't think those people could come back here.

Back in 1994, after Ron and Linda were acquitted, the life they'd had in Martinsville was already gone. Yeah, I mean, we've been found acquitted and people are, you know, they still think that, you know, that justice hasn't been done. And I mean, what was the use of going through five and a half months of court? It doesn't mean anything to them. They moved to a new town and tried to start over. Travis Sterling served roughly a year before being quietly released.

Of the other six accused, two are now deceased. Three others didn't respond to our efforts to reach them. That leaves John Popowich. Never broke me, never broke my family. My two daughters, my ex-wife, and the strongest people I know. After the Martinsville cases fell apart, John launched a malicious prosecution suit against the police investigators, the prosecutors, two Martinsville police chiefs, the province of Saskatchewan, and more. The suit dragged on for years.

John Popowich's legal nightmare began 10 years ago this month, a nightmare he can finally say is over. The public will now know that I'm an innocent man. I have the papers to prove it. A decade after John was taken away in the back of a police car, his civil suit was settled out of court. The wind had finally changed direction. John got $1.3 million from the Saskatchewan government

and a personal apology from the province's then Minister of Justice. I flew my daughter out from Pittsburgh to come to the apology, like they wanted to do it a certain day. I said, no, I need four days. Flew Ray out, and that's my daughter's name. And we met with Mr. Axworthy, and we got our apology. And, you know, I never met him before. He was a hell of a nice gentleman, and it came from the heart. It came from his heart. Down to earth, nothing big and fancy. And when somebody's getting a little choked up, no, it came from his heart.

Most of the other accused also launched civil suits. And those two were settled out of court. Officials expressed their sympathies to all the wrongly accused. But they didn't admit wrongdoing. John was the only one to receive a formal apology. And yet, none of that means John's been able to put it all behind him. Still today, there's still people, there's policemen, policemen who still think I'm guilty. John's retired now, but he still runs into people,

including old colleagues, who believed him to be guilty from the outset and believe the same today. It's usually at funerals where there's a group of guys and there's always the one standing there that can't stand my guts. Go over and offer him your hand to shake his hand, because they look pretty stupid when they won't shake your hand. Just my bit of vengeance.

John swears he doesn't let it bother him. And a good friend of mine, who's also my psychiatrist, said, John, if you're going to worry about people, what they think of you, he says, you'll die. Well, I'm enjoying life. The settlement money helped.

People say, well, money don't matter. You're damn right it matters. You can, my kids got a matter. You're damn right it matters. My kids got a house. You know, we did things that we couldn't do. Yes, money helps to do things, to give them something that was taken away from them because Papa was accused of all kinds of things. Papa didn't do anything,

but you're trying to do things to help the kids, and you need money to do it. In the years after the trials, John used to grab coffee with the other officers who'd been accused. But the conversation couldn't help but turn to Martinsville. And in time, that became its own kind of burden. But the conversation couldn't help but turn to Martinsville. And in time, that became its own kind of burden. Now, for John, it's as over as it can be.

You know, I can't keep kicking that can down the road. Oh, poor me, it happened to me. Well, it did happen. Suck it up, Let's move on. It's part of my life. And how do you get rid of it? Of all the people charged, I mean, outside of the Sterlings, he really took the big hit. You know, people don't remember the police chief's name or any of these people, but John Popowich, oh yeah. He was the Saskatoon cop, the guy who had the meltdown on camera.

Saskatoon journalist Dan Zekreski. I think that's one of the reasons why John is so open to talk. It's still an open wound for him. Dan covered John's malicious prosecution suit extensively. You know, by the time the civil stuff rolled around, I was John Popowich's last resort. His police colleagues didn't believe him. The government didn't, like, nobody believed this guy, the general public. It was me and his lawyer. And boy, that's when you find out why you're doing what you do, because it's not fun being the guy on the outside. Unless you like that stuff, which I did. In part, it was just a great story. You had a pit bull defense lawyer who just would not let go.

But he really did. He really did believe this guy was wrong and put his own business and career on the line to prove otherwise, or to prove that he was. I remember going to visit him in his office because he was a really good source. And he would be, you know, 6.30 in the morning sitting on the floor with, you know, 50 different stacks of documents, an ashtray, a chain smoking. He's looking at a guy who's gone right down the rabbit hole. And I would just look at him and go, oh my God, man. Dan's dogged pursuit of that story baffled his colleagues,

who seemed to think he should drop it. Why are you still interested in this? Like, it's over, right? We've all moved on. Well, no, we're not quite ready to move on yet. We've all moved on. Well, no, we're not quite ready to move on yet. But Dan was digging into the story for a more personal reason, too. We need an accounting here.

John's lawsuit forced the disclosure of mountains of correspondence and paperwork. And Dan says it was only then that the full story came out. Telling that story was his way of making amends. It changed everybody that had been involved in it, including local media. Dan says he did see some good come out of Martinsville. Just because of what people had gone through. There was just a hypercritical approach to everything. We didn't believe anybody.

Also, I think post-Martinsville, it wasn't that I lost respect for the police, but it was the first time I had ever taken a good, critical look at the Saskatoon Police Service as a police service. And it culminated in probably around the year 2000. It was dead of winter. And we'd had a fellow turn up frozen out at the dump. First Nations guy.

His body was found frozen out there on a Tuesday morning. Bitterly, bitterly cold. A railway worker had spotted it. I went back to the office and then my supervisor was saying, look, we've heard rumblings that cops have been dropping First Nations guys off outside of town instead of taking them in. For years, these kinds of freezing deaths had been deemed tragic accidents. Turned out, cops had been picking people up, often at night, driving them way out of town and leaving them there. They called the practice Starlight Tours.

So we went and confronted the police and the notion that, you know, a police force in a modern metropolitan city would be routinely taking people out, and sometimes they'd die. It would have been inconceivable a decade earlier without Martinsville having sort of lifted the scales from my eyes on that. That's what I learned from that. These things are possible. Well, the unfortunate thing, and I think what makes it, what gives what you're doing today, it's relevant.

If you take away the Brotherhood of the Ram, the satanic angle, all of that, and just look at it as a case of children being sexually abused at a daycare, that's an investigation you could have today. If you take that stuff away from it, the exact same challenges are all there. What's the integrity of the interviews? What's the motives of the people involved? How far does it go? It's stuff we still wrestle with any sexual assault case, right down to you have to be so careful about accusing someone because it will change their world forever. When you're accused of horrendous things like this, it's no better than murder.

And it affects a lot of lives. Richard Klassen has a unique relationship to the Martensville case. That's because just before the Martensville nightmare began, Richard and his family were going through their own nightmare, just down the road in Saskatoon. Oh, in our case, they accused us of drinking blood, sacrificing babies in the backyard of Saskatoon. ritualistic abuse where we all wore robes and cut up babies and drank their blood and eyeball stew and and I mean when listening to it now it's almost laughable. Richard, his wife, and other family members were being accused of ritually abusing three foster children,

a 10-year-old and his two younger sisters, who were in the care of one of Richard's brothers. Soon, 16 people were charged with almost 70 counts of sexual assault. And in 1992, as Richard and his family were still fighting to clear their names, the news out of Martinsville was another blow. It was, you know, oh no, here we go again. And unbelievable. Like, I just, I couldn't believe how anyone could believe what was being said.

Richard's approach was to be as outspoken about it as he could. Two protesters, Richard and Kerry Clausen, walked back and forth in front of the courthouse. It's not right. We have to stop this. The judge in the Sterlings case is concerned the protesters might interfere with his case. He had the protesters arrested and hauled before him. We did everything we could to bring attention

to what was being done to us, and I lost a lot of family members. Even some of my brothers don't talk to me today, all because of this case. Because they think you're guilty? No, no, no. Because they went through so much, I dragged it to the end. They wanted to forget after the charges were stayed. In Richard's case, Crown prosecutors decided not to pursue the charges before it could go to trial. But when they announced the move, they made it clear their motivation was to protect the children from the stress of testifying,

not to exonerate the accused. I wanted to fight back hard. I wasn't going to let this happen. No way. This involved my wife, myself, my children as they grew up, my grandchildren. I wanted them to read someday that we did not do this. We were accused of it, yes. But we did not do this.

I never put my head down. I never ran away from this. We were accused of it, yes. But we did not do this. I never put my head down. I never ran away from this. I stood there with a picket sign. I took the beatings that I had to take. And now I'm proud of what I did. The three children at the center of Richard's case eventually recanted, nearly ten years later. The eldest admitted not only to lying to authorities, but to forcing his sisters to go along with it. So I thought, you know, if I can make up all these stories, people would start paying attention to me and start, you know, caring about me and stuff. I feel bad because of it. Barbecued babies, orgies, drinking blood, ritualistic sex. Massive sexual parties.

Yeah, none of that's true. All lies. All lies. Richard saw his family's life blown apart by outrageous accusations. Then, he watched the Martinsville nightmare do the same to so many others. And after that, he saw his community just move on, as though none of it had ever happened. You know, it just kind of went away.

Nobody remembers what happened there. Oh, even my own children, sometimes they forget, and their mothers themselves now. And even they can forget, and they have to be reminded. You know, things can go awry very quickly. And a good example of that, my daughter came and said another child was abused by an uncle, a friend of theirs. I said, okay, then that has to be taken serious and there'll be an investigation. But you can't just immediately say it happened. And it's hard for people because as soon as a child is involved, the first thing you want to do is believe the child. I think that

it's very important that we continue to protect children and believe them if they say they're in danger. But investigations need to be done. The willful amnesia that surrounds not only his case, but all the satanic panic cases, bothers Richard. And so does the way we jump to conclusions as quickly as ever. We should all be reminded of it. I tell people all the time, you know, you have to be very, very mindful of what you hear in the media and what you hear from people.

It may not always be what it seems. This leads me to the idea of a public inquiry. It never happened. You pushed for one. Why didn't it happen? Yeah, that's a good question. And I probably should have continued to push for it. There never was a public inquiry into what had happened in Richard's case or in Martinsville. No broad acknowledgement of what had gone wrong. At the time, the Saskatchewan government said this. The conduct of the prosecution, I think, is not being questioned by anyone.

So I'm not sure what it is that we would inquire into. The present government told us they are, quote, not currently considering any inquiries into these events. Is it too late for a public inquiry? I don't think so. I think it's in the public's interest. I think there were a lot of people damaged by we that believed the children.

That's the story here. That's why a public inquiry really was necessary. It's not just for the accused, but the victims here are also the children. They deserve answers. They deserve answers to. Without a public inquiry, there never was a formal chance to learn,

to clear the air, to even agree on what happened in Martinsville. To this day, there's no general agreement on the facts, but there should be. The courts have been clear the vast majority of the charges should never have been laid, let alone prosecuted. The RCMP-led task force concluded hysteria had shaped the case, and the FBI determined that the rash of seemingly similar cases could not be supported by evidence. And yet. I think anytime you can't determine the truth, or you have a result that is inconclusive, there's always going to be questions. Investigator Claudia Bryden. who had to endure this whole process and dragging their kid to court

and watching their child throw up in between testifying on the stand. If you dare suggest that this was all made up, I would fear for your safety because they would not tolerate it. And nor should they. I can tell you with respect to the Martinsville case, these kids, and I'm still in touch with some of these families,

they have never recanted. That's significant. When you look back, is there anything that you would do differently, knowing what you know now? Oh, for sure. I would have been far more assertive with my supervisor. I would have been far more assertive with the prosecutors.

More assertive about the need to call in the RCMP or other support early in the investigation. I really thought I did my due diligence. And everybody thought I was doing a great job. And like you said, you know what? Claudia says that included her supervisors and the prosecutors. These people were all happy with my work. They all encouraged me to continue on with what I was doing. So it was never in question. Until it was. Claudia concedes there was deep public concern over the case. But she says, quote, if there indeed was a panic out there, it did not affect my work.

We were aware that there were some unusual allegations that were made, and my job was to determine as much as possible what had happened. I believe the truth wins in the end. And, you know, there are forces in the universe. And I think the truth is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. What did you make of where it all ended up? And with almost all the charges being overturned on appeal. Things are often overturned just based on errors in law. And so while it looks on the surface like, you know, there wasn't a reason for these individuals

to be convicted in the first place, that's absolutely untrue. The court accepted evidence. Appeals do often hinge on errors of law. But that was not the case with Martensville. Six of Travis Sterling's eight convictions and all seven of the young offenders were overturned on the grounds

that they were not supported by the evidence. That a reasonable judge or jury could not have reached that verdict. You know, in doing your best, sometimes you don't get it right. You can't, you can't know. But there's no doubt in my mind that a lot of things happened at that daycare. There's no doubt in my mind that we only scratched the surface. But I believe there were far more individuals involved than Travis Sterling. This was bigger than Travis Sterling.

When I started work on this podcast, I wanted to find out what it was like for people when they realized they'd been affected by a hysteria. I wanted to know what they learned from it, what we could all learn from it. But that's not the story I found. As you found out wading into this story, 30 years later, people's lives are still blown up. You can make somebody cry on the phone in 10 seconds by saying those words. It turns out, for a whole lot of people, the Martinsville nightmare isn't really over. As I tried to get my head around it all, my mind kept returning to that call with Linda Sterling. Why would you do this? What good can come of it? I've answered those questions for myself

a dozen different ways. Because so many people still believe the wrongly accused were guilty. Because of all the misconceptions about what happened. Because there are more people than I ever imagined in Martinsville and every place like it who've been left on their own to pick up the pieces. And because as a society, we haven't really dealt with any of this. If there's any way to put it to rest,

to inch closer to some kind of resolution, I think it's worth trying. And that has to include a willingness to look at the whole truth. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. It's 1988. A young girl, nine years old, is living in a small town. The girl's parents both work. So before and after school, she's cared for by a small town. The girl's parents both work, so before and after school, she's cared for by a neighborhood woman who runs a daycare out of her home.

The girl arrives each day early. So early that, according to the girl, the babysitter sets her up on the couch under a blanket to get a little more sleep and then goes back to bed herself. It is during this time, when she's alone trying to sleep, that the babysitter's 19-year-old son begins to molest her. She says he'd always come out at approximately eight o'clock, right before he went to work, and he would sit down beside me and lift the blankets up a little bit and then start touching me. I was really scared, and I thought, if I say anything, he might hurt me.

So I just, I didn't do anything. She rolls over and rolls over again, trying to make him stop. But he doesn't. She says it happens again and again, over the course of three to four weeks, and becomes increasingly violating. The girl says, I finally thought this isn't right. There's something I have to do about it.

What he's doing to me is wrong. So I finally went to my school counselor and told her. So I finally went to my school counselor and told her. This account comes from the girl's testimony at the trial of Travis Sterling. In the transcripts, she speaks with such clarity and composure. I can almost hear it. As my producer and I searched for the children involved in the case, we stumbled on a comment posted on Facebook.

32 years after she first reported her abuse, the young girl, now an adult, was speaking out. As far as I know, it's the first and only public statement from one of the children in the Martensville case. It reads, in part, The system failed the children, not the Sterlings. I was cared for in that hellhouse. Her's was the complaint that predated all the rest. The complaint that never would have been pursued any further if Claudia Bryden hadn't found it shoved in the back of a filing cabinet. That young girl's disclosures were not elicited through repetitive and suggestive questions. She was not rewarded for providing information.

Of the many allegations from Martensville, this was one of only two charges that were ultimately upheld by the same courts that so confidently struck down all the others. by the same courts that so confidently struck down all the others. It's no wonder she believes all the children's allegations were real. Hers were. The fact that she got some kind of justice is one of the positives to come of all this. And that shouldn't be forgotten. I've come to think of the panic

as a funhouse mirror version of the world. Endlessly distorting. But amid the chaos, you can glimpse something real. Our top story, the Pope issuing a letter to the world's two billion Catholics and apologizing for the crime of sex abuse by priests. Pedophilia epidemic. That is how a new lawsuit describes the problem of child sex abuse. Jeffrey Epstein is accused of running a sex trafficking network as complex and well-organized as it is to serve a sexual impairment.

More than 150 detailing harrowing encounters with the doctor who disguised sexual abuse as medical treatment. When I first came to Saskatoon, I was ready to pack it up and leave because I couldn't believe the culture here. Ernie Lutet worked with the Saskatoon Police Force in the early 90s. He'd come to the city from northern Ontario just a few years earlier. And it's a great province. I mean, I've obviously worked out because I've been here ever since. But there was a certain segment of the population that saw no value in First Nations people. Especially because when they were migrating to the city, where did they end up? In the core.

And they ended up with social problems. And it was so easy to judge. And cops were not immune to that. As one of the only Indigenous officers on the police force at the time, he ended up with a nickname, Indian Ernie. It was given to him by some of the First Nations people he'd meet on his patrol, surprised to see a cop who was Cree. Did you ever worry that in that kind of a climate, where, you know, kids are looking at pictures and going,

him, him, him, him, and him, did you ever worry you were going to get accused? No, that's the advantage of being an native guy sometimes. There's only three of them there, that can't be them. Awesome. Ernie was a young constable when word of Martinsville spread. At first I was in, right? I was hook, line, and sinker.

Oh my God, there's satanic cults in Martinsville and blah, blah, blah. But once I realized that that was about as implausible as you can get, right? Then my worry about the kids is that if they were sexually abused, that it wouldn't be properly investigated because there was a hysteria pushing them along. What should we learn from this case? Like, why is it worth talking about it now? It's worth talking about because we bit into it very, very hard, and we're going for it.

And people in professions like law enforcement and prosecution and defense and media, it's our responsibilities as leaders, as leaders to lead. And leading means sometimes taking a step backwards and seeing if that's an actual minnow or if that's a fishhook before I go after it. If you do a story like this, you put that in the back of somebody's mind and their initial reaction is to something that's dramatic or scandalous. They're ready to go. But just before they jump off the diving board, they're going to go, maybe I'll step back here and see, is this really the whole picture?

off the diving board, they're going to go, well, maybe I'll just step back here and see, is this really the whole picture? Over time, Ernie would rise through the ranks and help make changes for the better. As a young officer, though, he saw the way some cases were deemed more important than others. I dealt with some pretty tough cases of sexual abuse,

but it was all in the inner city. So people, when I was doing stuff in the inner city, nobody wanted anything to do with it. But for me, they just kind of left me alone because most of my victims were from the poorer parts of town, so they would just let me go with my cases. More attention was being paid to fantastical traumas than to these terrible realities.

And step back just a bit further, and there's an even bigger irony. At the same time as the Martinsville case was unfolding, Canada's last residential school was still in operation, just a few hours away. was still in operation, just a few hours away. Residential schools were government-sponsored, church-run, and for decades, mandatory. Indigenous children from all over this country were forcibly removed from their communities and placed in these institutions.

Students who attended these schools were subject to sexual, physical, and psychological abuse and forced to abandon their language and culture. As this country, the continent, was agonizing over cabals of powerful people systematically abusing children, making such a show of the importance of believing them, the now well-documented physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse of children had been underway for a hundred years. They were there to teach us about the Bible and about God and stuff, and I remember thinking,

like, how can there be a God and let this happen to us? Residential schools are the closest thing I can think of to the imagined threat of the satanic panic. A powerful cabal kidnapping children, destroying not just their bodies, but their souls. In this much more everyday way, children were being sacrificed, but everyone was looking the other way. They were looking at Martinsville. looking at Martinsville. I feel for all the kids who would have watched the concern and the resources going to the Martinsville case. Kids who would have noticed those signs in the windows. We believe the children.

But maybe not all the children. Belief isn't always equally distributed. Underneath the short history of the panic, there's a long history of not believing real disclosures of sexual victimization. And maybe even worse, of actively undermining survivors' own sense of reality, pointing the funhouse mirror in their direction. He didn't mean it. He loves you. It's all in your head. You must have misunderstood. There's no way your father, uncle, priest, neighbor would do that. Or in my case, if he didn't rape you, it doesn't count. For a kid who isn't protected, who isn't believed, it can really feel like the

world is conspiring against you. Everyone seems to be blaming or shaming or gaslighting or just studiously looking the other way. Anything to avoid facing the uncomfortable truth. That people we love, adults who are meant to take care of children, are the most likely to hurt them. That's the reality adults need to be brave enough to look at, head on. The satanic hysteria dropped off sharply after Martinsville. But it didn't end completely. Accused and convicted of rape in 1997 and 1998, the San Antonio force still can't quite comprehend what happened.

The little girls claimed they were raped during a drug-fueled satanical rage. American student Amanda Knox has been described as a satanic, diabolical she-devil at the appeal against her murder conviction in Italy. Someone, or in reality, many someones, posting as Q, falsely claim that the world is run by a satanic cabal of elites. Do you believe there's a ring of high-profile politicians

who are kidnapping and sacrificing children? I do believe that. The times we live in can feel so ripe for some brand new hysteria to take hold. There were many before the satanic panic. And there's no reason to think there won't be more. The seeds have been scattered on the wind. But whether they can find fertile ground, whether they grow and spread,

that's up to us. Uncover Satanic Panic is written and produced by me, Lisa Rundle, and Alina Ghosh. Mixing and sound design by Evan Kelly. Chris Oak is our story editor. Emily Connell is our digital producer. Original music by Olivia Pasquarelli. Evan Agard is our video producer. Tanya Springer is the senior producer of CBC Podcasts. Arif Noorani is our executive producer.

Leslie Merklinger is the senior director of Audio Innovation. Special thanks to Pia Chattopadhyay and CBC Radios Out in the Open for their interview with John Popowich and CBC TV's The Fifth Estate. For script notes and other crucial support, we want to thank Sarah Liss, Sarmishta Subramanian, Lisa Godfrey, Sam Colbert, Debbie Pacheco, Stephen I want to thank... John Koh, Ratna Ghosh, Cecil Fernandez, Mitchell Stewart, Ben Shannon, and everyone who helped us make this podcast better.

Finally, a very special thanks to all the people who trusted us with their words. As always, you can find us at CBC Podcasts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or send an email to uncover at cbc.ca. What do you think you're going to tell your kids about this when they're older? We have talked about the fact that there are people who hurt other people. And so they have heard that somebody said that my dad hurt them and that I got taken into foster care. And so they're aware of this, but I am frank with them. I do tell them, you know, as much as I can without trying to, you know, damage their innocence. I mean, I hope that I've also raised

them to be, you know, we talk about this too, right? And I think a little bit of this distrust of authority, right, has me going, I understand that people are people and people make mistakes and I'm not angry. I don't carry this anger about it. But I don't expect everybody to know what they're doing all the time. And so, I mean, I remember talking to my daughter a little while ago and I said, how do you know that when I teach you something, it's true? And she went, because you told me it. And I went, don't do that. I could be wrong. And, you know, just teaching them this, having this ability to look at everything kind of objectively and go, okay, so is this person telling the truth? And so, I mean, as far as that goes, yes, I will tell my kids

all of the things and that'll shape how they see the world. And I hope that'll be a good thing. If you want to hear more about how the satanic panic swept through the United States, check out the newest season of conviction, American Panic. In 1989, nine-year-old John Quinney accused his father of being a satanic cult leader and abusing him in satanic rituals. His father denied all the charges. It was a case that tore their family apart for decades. But now John Quinney is convinced his dad was innocent. On this season of Conviction, how does hysteria take over? And how do dozens of children's memories become so twisted that they're willing to falsely testify against their own parents. From Gimlet, Conviction American Panic is out now.

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