Some said they were kidnapped, tortured, and raped by satanic cult members who stole into their childhood bedrooms at night and whisked them away to secret locations.
Stories like this happened all over the country through the ‘80s and ‘90s as people reported memories of just-recalled abuse. He later recanted his confession but still spent 10 years in prison. He couldn’t remember abusing his daughters or anyone else, so, he thought, he must have repressed it. One of Ingram’s daughters said she’d gotten pregnant and caught an STD from her dad-claims later disproved by a physician.Īll the accused were eventually cleared of charges except for Ingram, who quickly admitted his guilt when questioned by law enforcement. Ingram’s children accused a number of their father's colleagues in the Sheriff’s Office of partaking in hundreds of satanic rituals and of murdering 25 babies. The family were members of a Pentecostal church that preached the idea that Satan could take over peoples’ minds, force them to commit unspeakable crimes, and then wipe all traces from their memories. In another famous case, Paul Ingram, a deputy in the Thurston County Sheriff’s Department and chair of the county Republican Party, was accused by his daughters of molestation.
This saga is now remembered as the “Wenatchee witch hunt,” and it’s not the only case of “repressed memories” gone wrong in Washington state. The problem was, it wasn’t true, and later, after law students and faculty at the University of Washington Innocence Project Northwest took up the case, all the verdicts were overturned or the charges reduced.
After the allegations were made, children were taken from their families and placed into foster care, and in all, 18 people went to prison. Parents and Sunday school teachers were accused of participating in an organized sex abuse ring called "The Circle," where they passed children around at sex parties and church events. Many of these cases have become famous: In 1995, for instance, 43 adults in Wenatchee, Washington, were arrested on 29,726 charges of child sexual abuse involving 60 children. Nancy Tyson was one of tens of thousands of adults and children who claimed to remember horrific physical or sexual abuse after undergoing psychiatric counseling. It was the first state in the nation to do this, but others would soon follow suit. Two years later, however, the Washington State Legislature did what the court refused to do, and passed a law revising the statute of limitations: Instead of requiring suits to be filed within three years of the alleged crime or the victim turning 18, now the statute of limitations would be expanded to three years after the victim discovered or remembered it. Tyson went all the way to the Washington State Supreme Court, but the court did not rule in Nancy’s favor: The majority decided that the potential adverse effects on the state judicial system-as well as the lack of empirical evidence supporting her claims-were serious enough side with the defendant. Nancy Tyson wanted to sue her father for damages, but there was a problem: The statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse was, at the time, just three years after an alleged assault or the victim turned 18, and she was well past both. It wasn’t until she started going to therapy as an adult that she’d remembered what had taken place. Tyson claimed that her father, Dwayne Tyson, had sexually abused her on a regular basis when she was between the ages of three and 11, and that she had been so traumatized that she blocked out all memory of it. In 1983, a 26-year-old woman named Nancy Tyson took her father to court in Washington state. The widely debunked concept of repressed memories has been rebranded as "traumatic dissociation." metamorworks/Getty Images