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- [00:02]
Mike Kosper
This episode is brought to you in part by the Apologetics Guy show, the podcast that helps you find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity. Learn to explain your faith with courage and compassion. Join Moody Bible Institute Professor Dr. Michele Del Rosario@ apologeticsguy.com.
- [00:28]
Ken Lanning
This is CT.
- [00:35]
Rebecca Sebastian
A note to listeners this story contains sensitive content, including sexual abuse, child murder, and dark spiritual themes, and may not be suitable for all listeners.
- [00:48]
Mike Kosper
So we left things off in the last episode, more or less in the early 1990s. And when you think about it, that world was changing fast. The Reagan years were over, maybe with a little less triumph than his biggest fans had wished. Reagan seemed diminished when he left Office, and George H.W. bush didn't share his staunch conservatism nor his charisma. Even so, he won the 1988 election, and in the minds of many evangelicals, that victory sealed the deal. The GOP could count on evangelical support to show up at the polls. Jerry Falwell actually shut down his political action group, the Moral Majority at that time, though he continued to actively speak up about politics for years to come. Then, about A year later, November 9, 1989, comes one of the most interesting twists in the fate of history. There was an official in communist East Germany named Gunter Schabowski. He's walking to a press conference. He's handed this policy memo about changes to travel restrictions, and he scans it before sitting down with the microphone and doesn't quite understand what it says. For those of you who aren't German speakers, he's basically saying, permission has been granted for people to cross the border. They don't have to fill out any kind of elaborate paperwork. Everything's going to be expedited. If you're an East German wanting to travel to West Germany, permission is essentially granted. It's easy, go ahead, show up. People will let you across. What you hear there is a reporter basically going, whoa, dude, are you serious? And he's like, yeah. I mean, it's what the paper says, though it's not actually what the paper says. So as a result, all of these East Germans and their West German counterparts, their pro democracy friends, they show up at the Berlin Wall and they show up at the borders and they're like, hey, we want to come across. And the border guards are like, we don't know what to do. We don't have any orders about this, but there's so many of these people. If it's one or two people, we're used to just shooting them. We don't want to just start randomly shooting Hundreds of people. And that was it. The border comes down, the Berlin Wall comes out. People pull out hammers, pickaxes, and the next thing you know, the Cold War is over.
- [03:51]
Ken Lanning
Tonight, citizens from both Germanies are singing and dancing on the Wall itself.
- [03:55]
Mike Kosper
That's the great Tom Brokaw. But if you didn't know that already, I really can't help you from here.
- [04:01]
Ken Lanning
Reunited, right on top of that harsh symbol of division. Thousands of East Berliners have been pouring into West Berlin since the borders were opened. And tonight, in this city famous for its carefree nightlife, in the city where the song says, life is a cabaret, tonight in Berlin, it is freedom night.
- [04:18]
Mike Kosper
So again, just imagine yourself as an East German. You've been restricted from traveling to West Germany or any democratic nation for decades. And all of a sudden, this guy shows up on the news and says, hey, we've lifted all the restrictions. We're going to expedite all these requests. If you want to cross across the border, feel free, show up. It's all good. And all of a sudden, East Germans flood the border with West Germany. The Berlin Wall gets overwhelmed, and the guards, they don't know what to do, so they don't do anything. And the next thing you know, people start pulling out hammers and pickaxes and tearing the Berlin Wall down. This is how Communism falls. Not simply as the result of a grand strategy, though certainly that was a part of this story. But also because a bureaucrat misread a memo and the border police didn't know what to do in response. This is how the Cold War ended so suddenly. There's no looming threat from godless Communism anymore. And the atmosphere takes on a different set of tensions. Fast forward to 1993. It sort of makes sense to arrest three random metalhead teenagers for a multiple murder in West Memphis, Arkansas, just because of the fact that they have mullets and wear Metallica T shirts. But within months, that cause seems dubious. Today, the whole story seems absurd. But this is how culture changes. The more difficult question is to ask why? And we chase the answer to that question with one person in particular throughout most of the rest of this episode. From Christianity Today, I'm Mike Kosper, and you are listening to Devil in the Deep Blue Sea. This season, we're looking at the satanic panic. How chasing phantoms distracted us from real devils in our midst. Today's episode, Episode seven, the Spell Breaks.
- [06:46]
Rebecca Sebastian
You seem to think of taking hold of me instead Run, run, run away from the reaper Join me. But you spun around and you Never.
- [06:57]
Ken Lanning
Hear it coming when you're covering up.
- [07:14]
Mike Kosper
If you go down the rabbit hole of the Satanic panic, you'll quickly come across a statistic, one that I've cited here before on the show, that in the 1980s and early 90s, there were 12,000 reported cases of satanic ritual abuse which resulted in 11,000 investigations, not one of which showed an incredible link between child abuse and cult activity. That's not a made up stat. That's the result of the FBI's own examination of the data from the 90s, which was published right about the time the panic was evaporating. And one of the people behind that data is a retired FBI agent named Kenneth Lanning, whose story you're going to hear today. You'll also hear a lot from my co producer. Hello, this is Rebecca Sebastian. She's been working on the show from the very beginning and she's particularly worked on telling Lanning's story.
- [08:04]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah, so this story actually takes us back to the 1960s again. Ken Lanning was a college student and had it in the back of his mind that he wanted to join the FBI. But there was a war going on. So when he graduated, he enrolled in Officer Candidate School in the Navy. The natural thing for him was to get deployed on one of the big ships, sent off to Vietnam, possibly for as long as three years. But he had a problem.
- [08:27]
Ken Lanning
I wanted to get married and I realized that I was at Canada School. They told me that if I went into the Navy, I would probably be assigned to a ship and might be off out to sea for a year and a half to two years. So I said, oh my God, what am I going to do now? I'm not. They said, don't bother to get married. You're never going to see your wife anyway. They had some volunteer programs that they told us about it about, and one of them was Explosive Ordnance Disposal or Bomb Technician. Back then, very few people heard of it, eod. So I volunteered for that program, which involved a year of shore duty while I was at the school. There were a couple of FBI agents from the explosives unit in the FBI laboratory who used to come down. And my executive office introduced me to them and I got to know them pretty well. And they helped then to recruit me into the FBI when I was finished with my naval service. So when I finished my three, four years in the Navy, then I applied to be in the FBI and got involved in the FBI.
- [09:28]
Rebecca Sebastian
His first job in the FBI used his experience as a bomb technician.
- [09:32]
Ken Lanning
The FBI, in addition to being FBI agents who investigate cases under federal jurisdiction. The FBI also had an extensive training program that they did for state and local police. Because back in these days, in the 30s, 40s, 50s, even into the 60s, many local police departments had very minimal training. There were not a lot of police academies around. And a lot of the training came from the FBI because all FBI agents were college graduates. So we would do a lot of field police training. But anyway, when I was about ready to graduate from new agent training, man by the name of Jack Kirsch found out about me somehow and asked me if I would be available and be willing to go to what's called in service training as soon as the day, two days after I graduated from new agent training. That was unheard of because usually you didn't go to an in service until after you had been in the bureau for maybe five years as an agent. So for my first day I was reported there. And what I learned about it was a class on bombing. Because back then when this all happened, it was in 1970, and back then there was a lot of anti war protesters. And for some strange reason that I could never totally understand, some of the anti war protesters decided the way they would protest the war would be to blow up buildings and kill people. So there were a lot of bombings going on at the time and a lot of them were being perpetrated by what was referred to as new left radicals. And so they were trying to focus on improving the law enforcement response to bombing cases.
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Mike Kosper
The most famous of these groups was known as the Weather Underground or the Weathermen. Now their bombs didn't actually kill any of their targets. I guess we could call them mostly peaceful mailbombs.
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Rebecca Sebastian
We could. I wouldn't.
- [11:22]
Mike Kosper
Fair enough. Three of their own members died while making bombs in Greenwich Village in 1970. Other groups though, like the United Freedom Front and the Black Liberation army, also carried out bombings and other attacks that did lead to fatalities. And it just feels worth mentioning a theme that I'm not sure we've particularly said out loud on this show in a few episodes.
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Rebecca Sebastian
The 70s again.
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Mike Kosper
Yeah, the 60s, the 70s. I feel like we have these rose colored glasses for the 60s and the flower children. And when we think of the 70s, we think of Nixon and Watergate and Carter and malaise and gas prices, but we forget all of this stuff. Anti war protesters just shipping mail. Bombs from all over the place.
- [12:03]
Rebecca Sebastian
The Manson family. The panic over teen runaways. Go ask Alice.
- [12:07]
Mike Kosper
The dark underbelly of the Jesus movement. Mike Warnke's Fictions Are Born Jay's journal.
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Rebecca Sebastian
The Witchmobile, Jim Jones.
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Mike Kosper
It was chaos. Anyway, back to Ken Lanning, right?
- [12:20]
Rebecca Sebastian
So Lanning's experience here was training law enforcement officers in how to respond to and investigate these bombings. And that becomes important later because the war ends and these left wing groups like the Weathermans stop blowing things up. And the work he was doing consulting local law enforcement starts to dry up.
- [12:37]
Ken Lanning
And I said, well, what else can I teach? I learned this bombing stuff when I was in the military. He said, well, there's a whole list of things here that the bureau will train you in. So he gave me a list of topics and I just looked through their interview and interrogation, crime scene photography, and on and on and on. But as I got near the end of the list, there was something there that caught my eye. It was actually the first word of two words. The first word was sex. S E X sex crimes. And I said, you mean the bureau of put send me to training about sex crimes? He said, yeah, it's a two week in service. I said, okay, sign me up for that. So for probably all the wrong reasons, I volunteered for that. Went through the two weeks training, just became intrigued and fascinated with the topic, the whole issue of human behavior.
- [13:28]
Rebecca Sebastian
Lanning was intrigued by this field and ended up getting recruited to the Behavioral Science unit at the FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.
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Ken Lanning
Most people know of this unit from the movie Silence of the Lambs and the TV show Criminal Minds and things like that. They talk about the profilers and the Behavioral science unit and since changed its name many times. But I, so I left the field after 10 years as a field agent and went to Quantico.
- [13:56]
Rebecca Sebastian
In that unit. They did three things.
- [13:58]
Ken Lanning
We obviously did training because it was part of the training division. So we put on classes in schools and did presentations, we did research, we studied these different types of crimes. And the third thing that we did was what I, what we should have called case consultation. But at the time we called it by a name that became popularized unfortunately called profiling. Confused a lot of people. They know about profiling, but they don't really know that the profiling is only one small part of this case consultation. So it was an operational component. And when I got to the behavioral science unit, a man that was there who that had been training in the area of sex crimes, and I knew him from my sex crimes training, he said to me, why don't you and I specialize in this area and then you can better control what they do with you and where they assign you and what kinds of things you're working on and so on. And I said, well, what will my specialty be? So we just decided that I would focus primarily on child victim sex crimes, commonly referred molestation, and he would focus primarily on adult victim sex crimes, commonly referred to as rape.
- [15:10]
Rebecca Sebastian
What's interesting is that this job sounds partly like what you would imagine an FBI agent doing, traveling around, looking at evidence, and partly it's what an academic might do.
- [15:19]
Ken Lanning
It meant I got involved in cases. There was an operational component to my work. I did training, I did presentations, I did research. I studied these things. But a big part of my job was to consult on these cases. And the important word that confuses people is the word consult. Because I'm in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and they think of me as being an FBI agent who investigates. But FBI agents can only investigate federal crimes that are under the jurisdiction of the FBI. Most sexual victimization of children does not involve a federal offense of any kind. There's a few cases that do, such as moving children across state lines and that kind of thing. Or doing something on a government reservation, a military base or some kind of government facility. But for the most part, even if I wanted to investigate these cases, I couldn't. But I consulted on these cases, and what happened to me is that in my work, many police departments would call me and call the Behavioral Science Unit, particularly about strange and unusual cases. And so that's what led me into what came to be called satanic ritual abuse.
- [16:36]
Mike Kosper
Okay, so I'm curious how this works. I mean, I've seen Twin Peaks, Right? So the only reason that Dale Cooper shows up to investigate the murder of Laura Palmer is because Ronette Pulaski goes missing on the same night and she's found across state lines. There's jurisdiction issues that require the FBI, But I imagine that most of these satanic ritual abuse cases were more local and not under FBI jurisdiction.
- [17:00]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah. So a big part of what Lanning did with the Behavioral Unit was consulting local law enforcement could bring him in to train them, which was a big part of what he did. Or in a particularly difficult case, they could present the evidence they'd gathered. He would review it, provide guidance for how to interpret the evidence or additional steps they could take.
- [17:18]
Mike Kosper
But he couldn't officially investigate them.
- [17:20]
Rebecca Sebastian
Correct? Not without jurisdiction. And it was this consulting work that first got him involved investigating satanic ritual abuse.
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Ken Lanning
It was a police officer who had what later became called an adult survivor, a woman who came to see him describing what we now came to call satanic ritual abuse. And he told me this story. Took many couple of days to interview this woman, to tell this horrendous story of what happened to her when she was a very young child. And she told this story. And he was baffled, didn't know what to do. So he says, I'm going to call Ken Lanning at the Behavioral Science Unit and see what he can tell me about this.
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Rebecca Sebastian
And over time, as we now know, there were a lot of similar cases.
- [18:03]
Ken Lanning
So I had this peripheral role. It was very similar to what the FBI laboratory does when the local police department submit evidence to the laboratory to be examined. Occasionally, I might go out to the scene and talk to the people at the time they were investigating the case and make suggestions to them. But my role in these cases was really a consultation role, which is why, as time went on, I wound up consulting on hundreds and hundreds of these cases that became called Satanic Ritual Abuse. I would have never had the time to investigate them. So there are some disadvantages to being a consultant, but there's many advantages. You can look at it from a broader perspective. So in any given day, I could be talking to one or two, three different police departments or prosecutors offices or anybody else who is involved in the case officially, and talk to them. So in one day, I could talk to people about two or three different cases. I didn't run out and jump in a helicopter and fly to the scene and take over the investigation and tell them what to do. I would just make suggestions. And my suggestions were based on the fact that by many, the time that some of these people ever heard of their first case, I had already consulted on 5, 10, 20, 30 of these cases and knew more about it than almost anybody.
- [19:26]
Mike Kosper
So what year is all this happening?
- [19:28]
Rebecca Sebastian
This is all gathering steam, like late 1982, early 1983.
- [19:34]
Mike Kosper
So then to position it for our listeners, by this time, Mike Warnke's got three or four records out. Jay's Journal is a runaway bestseller, and Michelle Remembers has been published.
- [19:44]
Rebecca Sebastian
Right. And you've got the urgency of the religious right and the culture war happening. The shock of Jonestown is still very heavy on people's consciences.
- [19:51]
Mike Kosper
It's before the McMartin Daycare scandal, though, and it's before Laurence Stratford.
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Ken Lanning
Yes.
- [19:56]
Rebecca Sebastian
And so all this is simmering in the American imagination. And Ken is the guy you call at this point, not necessarily about Satanic ritual abuse. That's not even the language yet. But he's the guy you call with really dark, twisted crimes involving children, and one day he gets one of these calls. From a cop in New England.
- [20:13]
Ken Lanning
I wound up talking to him for several hours. And he described this story of what this woman said happened to her when she was a young girl. Now, the interesting thing about it, she didn't walk in there and say, I was sexually abused by satanists. She described these horrible, terrible people. And the key thing, and maybe this is a good time to point it out, when I started to study this, you can't study it. You can't research it if you don't first define it. And so many people, when they started to deal with this problem, would use the term, and I used it myself almost jokingly, these kinds of cases. So what are these kinds of cases and what all these cases had in common is they involved multiple victims. These offenders were molesting multiple children over time. It wasn't like you picked out a child, you molested them, you finished with that child, you found a second child. Basically, this was an ongoing thing, and you may be involved with 3, 5, 10 kids during any time period and so on. And the abuse was usually described as something that began when they were very, very young, sometimes 2, 3, 4, 5 years of age, Very young children. So it was multiple victims. The offenders were also described as multiple offenders. It wasn't just one guy. It could be 2, 3, 4, 5 people that were doing this and working together. And they seemed to be part of some kind of organized group. The third thing that was very important is unlike a lot of what I call child sex rings, we have one offender involved with multiple children, Such as with teachers, boy scout leaders, little league coaches. These individuals, these kinds of acquaintance molesters, very often have multiple victims. But in this particular case, they, Instead of grooming and seducing these kids and befriending them and showering them with attention and affection. That's the more common type. It's commonly referred to as grooming that such offenders use. In these cases, the ones we're talking about now, what came to be called satanic ritual abuse, the victims would always describe fear as the primary controlling tactic. The offenders would tell them that they would die, their parents would die, they would be hurt, they would be injured, that pets would die, terrible things would happen to them if they told anybody about this. So they described this frightening experience, that they were frightened. And the fourth characteristic that these cases had was that they involved what I would prefer to call bizarre, but most people wound up calling ritual type behavior. They would describe strange rituals, standing in circles, torturing children, hurting them, eating flesh, drinking blood, and sometimes human sacrifice and doing These kinds of things that I would call bizarre, but I had heard of them all and. Or some people decided to call it ritual, that these were rituals. And so when you started to look at this and you would say, here we have a group of men, primarily men, but a lot of women. That's another interesting aspect of these cases. There were significant numbers of alleged female perpetrators. But people who were doing this part of this organized thing and doing these bizarre things, you would say, well, what kind of organization would be doing this? What kind of organization are we talking about here? And I didn't do it. I didn't come up with this. But somewhere along the line, various people decided to start saying, these people must be what, Satanists, the ultimate evil people in service to the devil. And these are kind of things that we heard about the legend of Satanism, human sacrifice, drinking blood and eating flesh and doing these horrible things. So people decided that these people do. Doing this. We label them as Satanists. And the behavior that they engage in sounds to be part of some satanic ritual. And hence somebody, not me, but somebody, coined the term, and I don't really know who first coined it, to refer to these cases as satanic ritual abuse. As time went on, we got into the 90s, the satanic aspect of it got to be more and more unbelievable and undocumented. So people started looking at other aspects of this. Some people started to use SRA as standing for sadistic ritual.
- [25:03]
Rebecca Sebastian
Interesting.
- [25:04]
Ken Lanning
Other people said, this is being perpetrated by an organized group, but it's not a satanic cult. What's the organized group? It's the CIA.
- [25:14]
Rebecca Sebastian
Oh, okay.
- [25:16]
Ken Lanning
It's the FBI, it's the mafia, it's the kkk, it's the Klan, it's the white supremacist, whatever it is. But during the height of all of this and the concern about this, it was believed by many people that this was being perpetrated by a satanic cult.
- [25:33]
Rebecca Sebastian
At the time. They fill in this blank, they're like, well, we don't know who's doing this, but it must be Satanist because it was so depraved, so, so awful. You want to assume it's the worst thing imaginable. So how did you make sense of it and reconcile the idea that these were Satan worshipers? As a Catholic, as an FBI agent, did, did that make sense to you or did you think even then it seemed a little dubious?
- [25:58]
Ken Lanning
Okay, let me just tell you the truth. At the beginning, when I first talked to this police officer for two, three, four hours, whatever it was. And I said to myself, when I got to the end, everything that he told me about, I had heard. I was aware of sex offenders who had murdered their victims, who had mutilated their victims, who had drank their blood. I just never heard this story altogether, you know, group that did this all together. And I said to myself, when I hung up the phone, I said, boy, I'm never going to hear about that. That was sure an unusual case. And within two weeks, I got a call from a second individual who was a different person, but I at first thought it was the same case. And he said, but I said, I already know about this case. And he said, no, this woman told me she's never been to the police. And I said, but I heard about this case. But then when we started to examine it more closely, I realized it had those four elements, but it was a different case. It wasn't exactly the same. And I said, could there be possibly two of these cases? And so it began. And what I never imagined is after that, my phone would ring again and again and again.
- [27:12]
Mike Kosper
We'll be right back.
- [27:18]
Rebecca Sebastian
Hey, there. I'm Clarissa Maul, producer and moderator of Christianity Today's flagship news podcast, the Bulletin. Join Russell Moore, Mike Kosper and me each week as we discuss breaking news and current events that matter to you. Every Tuesday and Friday, you'll enjoy wise, measured, deeply Christian conversation about the people, events and issues that are shaping our world. Find us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and join our Bulletin community.
- [27:52]
Ken Lanning
I went to Catholic grammar school, I went to Catholic high school, and I went to Catholic college.
- [27:57]
Mike Kosper
Once again, this is retired FBI agent Ken Lanning had the nuns.
- [28:01]
Ken Lanning
They told us a lot about Satanism and Lucifer, the fallen angel, and all that kind of stuff. Better to rule in Hell than to serve in heaven and all that kind of stuff, and how he defied God. And God then had Saint Michael, the patron saint of law enforcement, to mount the archangels who attacked Lucifer and drove him into hell. And then he spent. Now he spends all eternity trying to tempt and to jump forward here a little bit. After about two or three years, I became increasingly concerned about something. And the easiest way I can explain it is that in these cases, no matter what the police did, no matter what I advised them to do or suggested that they do, they could never find clear and convincing corroboration of the allegations. And what's important here is not that there wasn't any corroborative evidence. What's important here is there wasn't any corroborative evidence when there should have been. So if a little girl says, I remember when I was five or six years of age, my father would sneak into my bed at night, climb in there and touch me in my private areas, and so on and so forth, and then get up and leave. And this happened 20 or 30 years ago. If you can't find any corroborative evidence of that, that doesn't mean a whole lot, because what corroborative evidence would there be? What's going to be left behind? But in these cases where they're talking about murdering people and torturing people and large numbers of multiple perpetrators involved in a group and so on, the police know that the easiest crimes to solve are the ones that have multiple perpetrators. Because human beings always make mistakes. The more people involved, the more mistakes that are going to be made. And so it was the lack of corroborative evidence when they should have been corroborative evidence.
- [29:54]
Mike Kosper
This is really a feature of the whole satanic panic. Whether it's the McMartin case or the West Memphis Three, there are these allegations of crimes that should result in all kinds of corroborative evidence. Not to get too graphic here, but consider the fact that in several of these cases, the McMartin case being a perfect example, you hear these stories about animal mutilation, torture with knives, bloodletting, bodily fluids being consumed, and yet there's no evidence, no trace of animal hair, no blood, no DNA. It's utterly consistent across all of these different cases.
- [30:25]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah. And the other thing you have going on, and Lanning points us out, is that there's a new awareness about child abuse and child sexual abuse in the mainstream.
- [30:33]
Ken Lanning
Sexual victimization of children, you could argue, has been essentially denied by humankind for 2,000 or more years. Freud didn't know whether he could even believe his patients were describing this. So many people just denied that it was going on. And the only kinds of cases they really talked about when I first began in 1973 was kind of Stranger Danger. Child molesters were dirty old men in wrinkled raincoats. We have hid behind a tree and say, little girl want some candy? But as we got into the 70s, we began to realize, through the whole child abuse movement and looking at the whole issue of child abuse, we came to realize that most children are abused by their family members. And even when it comes to sexual abuse, a lot of times these cases were intra within the family, intra familial cases. Child was being molested by their father, their stepfather, their grandfather, sometimes their Mother, sometimes their grandmother. But it was a one on one, intra familial type case. And when I first started to go to the big conferences around the country, that's what the focus was on, intra familial, one on one. But I also got involved in cases involving school teachers, little league coaches, clergymen and all kinds of people like that who were involved with multiple children. And so I began to see that there was something unusual about these cases. And I began to say, it appears that at least some portion. I don't know what portion it is, but some portion of what these victims are alleging just didn't happen.
- [32:09]
Rebecca Sebastian
He talked about how in case after case, someone would allege satanic ritual abuse. And they'd say, we sacrificed a person or a child or a baby and we buried the bodies at such and such location. And the police would go look and the forensic teams would dig and over and over just turn up no evidence.
- [32:25]
Ken Lanning
You could never find this corroborative evidence. Nobody ever snitched anybody off. You didn't arrest a guy and he says, okay, I did this. But let me tell you about these other guys I know who are doing this other stuff and find some kind of habit. The other interesting thing is many of the victims described it all being photographed and videoed and so on. That there were visual images of what was done. So we also looked at that because that would constitute usually child pornography. And that's a serious violation also on the FBI jurisdiction. Quite often if the pictures are going across state lines or it's being taken with equipment that was made with pieces from different countries, There was a way the FBI could involve. So we couldn't find the pornography. We couldn't find anybody who snitched anybody off. We couldn't find the corroborative evidence and so on. And so it was a very difficult things. And I said, but if this isn't happening, this is going to do tremendous damage to the progress we've made in recognizing the child. Sexual victimization does take place.
- [33:31]
Mike Kosper
That seems like the big deal with all of this.
- [33:34]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yes. If you think of the Satanic panic as just this weird set of stories that pop up for 10 to 15 years, it's strange. It's like the Salem witch trials or any other conspiracy that takes hold. But for Lanning, he's working to get law enforcement to take child abuse allegations more seriously. To bring this crime out of the shadows so children can be defended and criminals can be prosecuted. But instead, he's dealing with this strange flood of terrible stories and with Nothing at all to back them up.
- [34:03]
Ken Lanning
And so I just realized that I needed to try to find in my job and because I wanted to have health was very important. What is happening in these cases? Why are these victims alleging something that does not appear that it happened? And I kept my mouth shut for a long time because I wasn't going to go public with this doubt that I had until I was more sure of it.
- [34:25]
Rebecca Sebastian
So for several years, he just keeps doing his research, paying close attention to these cases, trying to make sense of why there are so many of these claims. And in particular, he starts paying attention to the community of people who got involved. Whenever sexual abuse allegations would surface, how they responded, how they went about their work.
- [34:42]
Ken Lanning
I started to express my doubts. I said, you know, it is certainly possible that a few people could do this and get away with it and not be known. But when I added up all the cases I had, for the same reason that some people believed it was going on, because there were so many cases, is the same reason I began to doubt it. There was just hundreds of children alleging that thousands of perpetrators were doing this to hundreds of thousands of victims. And there's no evidence, no real hard evidence that is going on. And I said, I just don't see how that's possible. And so I began to express my skepticism. And so I said, I don't know what's going on here, but I don't think, I don't. I can't say all of it, but most of this stuff, certainly the extreme stuff that's being alleged, does not seem to have happened. But then I had to ask myself, if it didn't happen, why are these victims alleging it? The most significant point and the thing that's a teaching point for America today in so many areas, if this isn't happening, why are there so many intelligent, highly educated, well trained experts claiming that it is going on? Not a bunch of nuts. In the FBI, we always had a regular stream of nuts that would contact the FBI and tell you stories about how they were being bombarded from rays from outer space and stuff like that. These weren't nut cases. There's nut cases out there. But these were people that I knew and respected. And when I went to them and expressed privately my doubts about these allegations, I said, do you have any suggestions? And their only suggestion was, kids, don't lie about this. It must have happened. You just have to work harder and you can find the evidence. Just keep looking. Don't give up. And I said, okay. So I kept looking. I kept Keeping an open mind, Lanning.
- [36:38]
Rebecca Sebastian
Told me several stories about encounters with abuse survivors and therapists who started to shift his perspective. One thing he pointed to in particular was an experience at a conference for law enforcement where a woman claiming to be a survivor of satanic ritual abuse was on stage. During the talk, a woman near him recognized him, tapped him on the shoulder and said, I'm a survivor, too, you know. Then after the talk, they spoke, and.
- [37:01]
Ken Lanning
She said, you know, I was the victim of being molested by my father. And my father was a cruel, evil, rotten man who did terrible things to me when I was growing up. And when I got older and I get to my teen years, I was able to come forward and describe to my therapist and other people what my father had done to me. And as a result, because my case was so extreme, those are the cases that we like to talk about, we like to focus on. Because somebody who reformed themselves from eating too many ice cream cones, that doesn't make a big story. But the worst stuff that you were doing that you now stop doing or reformed or left, the more significant it is, the more impact it has. So she was on the lecture circuit, and she would do these presentations and got a lot of attention, except along came another group of people very similar to her. Similar story. But instead of having this happen to them by one man, their father, it happened by a group of people who were in a satanic cult. And what kind of attention do you think she gets?
- [38:08]
Mike Kosper
We've talked about the grifters already, right? People like Mike Warnke and Lauren Stratford. These are people who became famous telling these fantastic stories. I think what you see here is something much more subtle, this conference circuit. Perhaps this is a person who really experienced something horrific, or maybe it was grift. But there's this reinforcing mechanism here. It's an ecosystem. You want the next conference gig, you'd better have the best story.
- [38:33]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah. The complexity is people may not necessarily be lying. It may be that the story emerges in a therapeutic context and they really believe it. Ken had to account for that, too.
- [38:44]
Ken Lanning
What you discover here is people wanted to believe this. And basically, I almost stopped using the words truth and lie to describe these allegations and started using the terms accurate and inaccurate because some of these people aren't necessarily lying. It's not a lie if you, the person, believe it. But many people suffering from factitious disorder, also called Munchausen syndrome, tell these inaccurate accounts, these stories, because they want attention and they want forgiveness. But anyway, there would be somebody standing up There in the room. And if you introduce them first, this is Mary Smith. She is the victim of satanic ritual abuse. And she describes what happened to her. In many of these cases, if you're being victimized in this way, not only are people victimizing you, but you're participating in the victimization of others. And I was actually on the Larry King Show. He wasn't there that day, where this woman comes on and she admits that as a result of her satanic ritual abuse, she committed over 100 murders. She would be one of the most prolific serial killers ever known to mankind. And when she finishes telling this story that everybody's sitting there and just sucking it up, nobody runs to the front of the room and wrestles her to the ground and puts handcuffs on her, she's been forgiven. And I said, because she was described. Now if we switch it around and the next presenter is not described as a victim that this happened to, but presented as an offender who did these horrible things, then you want this guy hung at dawn and all these terrible things, lock him up forever and so on. Because now you're viewed as a victim, I mean, as an offender. But the victims get a lot of attention and forgiveness. And so I stopped using the words accurate and inactive. I mean, lie and truth. Because some of these people, if they truly believe that it happened to them, then it's not a lie, just not accurate. And also, somebody could make. And listen carefully to these words I'm going to use. Somebody can make a valid allegation of sexual abuse without the S at the end, a valid allegation. I was sexually victimized when I was a child. But that valid allegation can include inaccurate or false allegations with an S at the end. So the fact that I was victimized, that's valid. But how I was victimized and how it unfolded may not be accurate. It may involve things that didn't happen. And so therefore, when I started to look at this, I took a kind of unpopular position because this tended to polarize people. And that polarization that took place in the country became known and labeled cross, labeled as the witch hunt and the backlash extremism. And I talked to both of these groups. One group, the witch hunt, they were labeled the witch hunt. Not by themselves. They didn't say, I'm Ken Lanning. I'm here from the Witch Hunt. I'm Ken Lanning. I'm here to tell you about this terrible thing that's happening to our church children. The other side, the non believers, labeled them as the witch hunt. The other people who said that this is mass hysteria, this is some kind of satanic panic, as people came to call it. And all these things didn't happen. They were labeled by the other side as the backlash. They were trying to deny something that people. Some people didn't want to believe, and some people did want to believe.
- [42:16]
Rebecca Sebastian
Lanning wasn't alone in his findings either. Other people were asking similar questions, and as a result, law enforcement became polarized.
- [42:24]
Mike Kosper
What really struck me listening to him, was the degree to which he was careful to lay out his terms. He's not saying child sexual abuse isn't happening. This is all just an empty panic. He's saying it is happening. We know it's happening, but we don't have any compelling evidence that it's happening in this way.
- [42:42]
Rebecca Sebastian
And that highlights the danger of the false story. It got all kinds of people looking out for Satanism and the occult in an effort to protect their children, when.
- [42:50]
Mike Kosper
The real perpetrator might have been a family member, a coach, a neighbor, a babysitter. And the abuse had nothing to do with the occult whatsoever. Which is not the same thing as saying there was no abuse.
- [43:01]
Rebecca Sebastian
Right. So along with the pop culture hype, the Warnkeys, the alarmists and law enforcement community, you also had the media, whom Ken says managed to play both sides of the panic, depending on which outlet.
- [43:12]
Ken Lanning
You viewed their bias. And their confirmation bias is they want ratings, they want money, they want advertising. So the media, at the beginning, and I would give you the classic example, I don't know whether it was 2020 or which one of those shows, they were doing the story, and they did a story about all this kind of ritual abuse and so on. And they said that these groups, the satanic cult that was doing this was using North Korean brainwashing techniques. That's how they were controlling all these people and the children and so on. But if you turn the clock Forward after the McMartin trial ended and no one was convicted, then 60 Minutes enters the picture and they do their program, and it begins with, they pan the alleged perpetrators, which were primarily women who worked at the McMartin Daycare Center. And they panned them all. And then whoever the announcer was, I can't remember which one it was, said, do these people look like child molesters? So what the media did is it some of them fueled the response and frightened and scared people, and some of them actually calmed it down. And so later on, particularly on pbs, Frontline and a few other people started to do stories about this that really started to cast a shadow over these allegations.
- [44:32]
Mike Kosper
So talk to me about how the tide turned. Why does the panic sort of dry up?
- [44:37]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah, I asked Ken that, and here's what he had to say.
- [44:39]
Ken Lanning
It began to fade, but it didn't totally go away. It pops up in different parts of the country. It's not as quite as national and international and so on. So it just began to fade, as it frequently has done in the past, from its own weight of implausibility. It just makes sense and people move on to other things.
- [44:58]
Rebecca Sebastian
I think what he's getting at is that there was no single factor. It was just everything piling up. The lack of evidence, the questions around the science and psychology, the way the stories. And we didn't get too much into this on this episode, but it is actually really strange how the stories across the country were so weirdly similar. They all just kind of fell apart and people moved on to other news, other gossip, other controversies. Well, most people.
- [45:23]
Mike Kosper
Right. Most people. More on that to come. But for now, we'll be right back.
- [45:31]
Ken Lanning
What if you could see firsthand how God's working around the world right now? From house churches in Asia to revival in Africa, stories of faith are unfolding in every corner of the world. But too often, we only see a very narrow view of God's kingdom. That's why Christianity Today launched the Global initiative, part of the One Kingdom campaign, to shine a light on the powerful untold stories of the global church. Come see what God is doing by visiting one kingdom.christianitytoday.com it wasn't just people.
- [46:06]
Mike Kosper
In law enforcement like Ken Lanning who began to call into question some of this whole phenomenon. The interrogation techniques used on kids raised eyebrows in the world of psychology and psychiatry. After all, these satanic ritual abuse stories are almost all about memory. To explore that story, Rebecca sat down with Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist and one of the world's leading experts on memory. She's consulted on and testified in a number of high profile trials. And she's shown time and again how memory can be manipulated, sometimes unintentionally, often with devastating results. All right, Rebecca, so where do we start with Loftus's work?
- [46:44]
Rebecca Sebastian
Well, just for some context, yes, Loftus eventually became very well known in the courtrooms for her testimony on memory. But her your work really began with a much more scientific, academic look into memory.
- [46:55]
D
It started with the science. It started where I was doing scientific work on memory in general and then memory more specifically, about people who had seen accidents or crimes or other kinds of events that were legally important. And at some point, I wanted to see real witnesses in real cases. And so I volunteered my time just so I could get up close and see witnesses. And in an actual case, it was a murder case. And that's what really drew me into starting to think about the application to legal cases and really the application to everyday life as well. But mostly I think about things in the intersection between memory and the law.
- [47:51]
Mike Kosper
So her work in the legal realm is why she's so helpful.
- [47:54]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yes, for our story. But I wanted to start even more simply than that. I wanted to ask her what memory actually is. Not how it feels, but how it works. And her answer, I think, should sound familiar to you.
- [48:06]
D
Memory does not work like a recording device. We don't just record the event, play it back later. The process is more complex, and it tends to be a constructive process so that when we're recalling something, we're actually taking bits and pieces of information, pulling it together and constructing what may feel like a memory.
- [48:28]
Mike Kosper
Yeah, I think I said the same thing almost verbatim in a previous episode.
- [48:33]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yes, and I love how she takes that recording device analogy a step further. Further by saying not only is memory not fixed, it's constructed. Less tape recorder, more Wikipedia page.
- [48:43]
D
You can go in there and edit your own page, but. But other people can come in there and have their way with your page if they feel like it and make all kinds of changes.
- [48:55]
Mike Kosper
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
- [48:56]
Rebecca Sebastian
Right. And when I asked if there is any such thing as an irrefutable, objective memory, her answer was clear. Not without independent corroboration.
- [49:05]
Mike Kosper
And that brings us all the way back to episode one, the West Memphis Three. There was no corroboration at all in that case. Jesse Misskelley, a teenage boy with an intellectual disability, was interrogated for hours. He was fed details, he was led with suggestions, and ultimately, he confessed to a murder where there was no physical or circumstantial evidence to connect him. Just a story that seems obviously shaped by leading questions and intense pressure.
- [49:31]
Rebecca Sebastian
It's the exact kind of scenario Loftus has studied for decades.
- [49:34]
D
I once testified in a case where the officer went to the witness and showed him six photographs, and person said, no, I don't see the person here. And the officer said, well, I see your eyes drifting down to number six. What's going on there? And before you knew it, number six was being identified as the perpetrator.
- [49:57]
Rebecca Sebastian
That sounds so innocuous. But this was for a murder case. Which makes her point clear. Chilling. I mean, even well intentioned investigators can steer someone, intentionally or not, toward the story they want or need to hear. Once that story is formed, it can start to feel like a memory.
- [50:14]
Mike Kosper
You take that and you add the widespread fear that metalheads worship the devil and are killing our kids. And it was enough to send two teenagers to prison and a third one to death row.
- [50:25]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah, unfortunately, yes.
- [50:27]
Mike Kosper
So we've talked about how memory can be faulty or altered, but what about the idea that memory can be repressed, that someone can experience years of trauma and forget it, only to suddenly remember it decades later?
- [50:39]
Rebecca Sebastian
So this is interesting. Loftus talked about a shift that occurred in her work around the early 90s.
- [50:45]
D
The first couple of decades of my involvement in these cases, I was focused on police and police interrogations and the kinds of things that could sometimes go awry in the context of an investigation. It was later kind of in the early 90s, that we started to see an altogether more extreme kind of memory situation where people were going into therapy. Maybe they had one kind of problem. They were anxious, they were depressed, they had an eating disorder. And they end up with a therapist who engages in a set of activities thinking that maybe there's a history of sexual abuse in this patient's past and that their job is to try to uncover these repressed memories. And so now I began to look at this new environment where these therapists were leading people to develop, in some cases, completely false memories. And I think something else was going. You know, they really kind of believed in what they were doing, if you want to be very generous to those activities. They believed that repressed memories were the root of a person's symptoms and that those memories had to be revealed in order to make the patient or client, you know, feel better. But in the process, they did things that created the false memories, and many innocent people suffered as a result of it. So if you ask about the motivations, I think the generous interpretation is they, you know, they were led astray to believing, and this was the only idea they had for what could be wrong with the patient and what the treatment should be.
- [52:45]
Mike Kosper
And a less generous take money.
- [52:48]
Rebecca Sebastian
She's heard renowned sociologist and memory expert Dr. Richard Offshay say something along the lines of, why have $1,000 eating disorder patient if you can have a $200,000 multiple personality patient?
- [53:00]
Mike Kosper
The idea being that if you have an eating disorder, you might need a dozen therapy sessions, uncover some root causes, get connected to a support group like Overeaters Anonymous or whatever, and terminate therapy in a few months versus a multiple personality disorder. Where uncovering the hidden trauma could take years upon years upon years.
- [53:20]
Rebecca Sebastian
Yeah, that's the idea.
- [53:21]
Mike Kosper
It's a little cynical though, right?
- [53:24]
Rebecca Sebastian
Perhaps. And to get to that, I ask Dr. Laufis point blank, do we repress memories and can they be legitimately recovered?
- [53:33]
D
What I'm consistently said about this is we can not think about something for a long time and then be reminded of it. We cannot think about something that was very unpleasant and be reminded of it and have a memory. And you just have to go to a high school reunion.
- [53:51]
Rebecca Sebastian
But that's not what's being claimed in the satanic panic era stories we've been.
- [53:54]
D
Exploring, but what's being claimed in these cases. That is a huge collection of horrible traumas banished into the unconscious, walled off from the rest of mental life. You have no access to this, and then you can engage in some practices that will reveal these pristine memories. And now you're aware of them by some process that's beyond ordinary forgetting and remembering. And scientifically for that, I think there is no credible scientific support. One day we might find that support, but in the meantime, I don't think we should be throwing people into prison based on an unsupported, flimsy, speculative hypothesis.
- [54:42]
Rebecca Sebastian
And this, to me, is where our story holds real tension between what science tells us and those stories we tell ourselves that we want to believe. Because when we don't understand how memory works, we let fear guide the process. That's when emotions, Emotion starts to feel like evidence. And that's how lives get ruined.
- [54:59]
Mike Kosper
Right from the children of the McMartin preschool to Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley, who each served 18 years in prison. Not to mention the impact of books like Satan's Underground that made so many question whether or not they were carrying around forgotten trauma or hidden abuse, were quick to blame law enforcement or prosecutors. But we all wanted to believe this.
- [55:21]
Rebecca Sebastian
Stuff, and we still do. Because now in 2025, we're seeing memory work done through psychedelics, guided therapy sessions using MDMA or ketamine, where people start to remember long buried traumas. I mean, this is very normalized, Mike. I've seen it on the Real Housewives of Miami. Loftus says she's just starting to tackle this new method of recovering memory in her work.
- [55:45]
D
In my own work, we create false memories in the minds of people with purely behavioral techniques. And I have speculated that the future of this work might include, well, first of all, artificial intelligence activities. But we'll set that aside now. But pharmaceutical interventions combined with these suggestive behavioral techniques that might maximize the chances that people can be misled or led in a direction that a. A professional person wants them to go in.
- [56:25]
Rebecca Sebastian
But it's not just happening in therapy sessions. Lofis points to modern examples like Pizzagate, conspiracy thinking and Mike, I was not prepared for this. The use of artificial intelligence.
- [56:37]
D
We haven't even talked about the fact that people can take your photographs and AI modify them and then recirculate them to other groups of people and back to you. And all the ways these ways that the media and technology can influence what we remember. So it is something we have to keep an eye on so that we aren't creating, you know, a large new class of innocent victims.
- [57:13]
Mike Kosper
Well, that's not the most uplifting note to end on.
- [57:16]
Rebecca Sebastian
Well, wait, there's more. I think it's worth noting that Loftus served as an expert for the defense in two of the most notorious cases in the MeToo movement. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. And I think that's worth mentioning given our previous episode where we talked with Laura Robinson and. And also just to address the discomfort we sometimes feel in questioning a potential victim's story.
- [57:39]
D
The MeToo movement came along. It had a lot of benefits. Finally, some of the, you know, the stories of women and children were being believed, but also there were innocent people who got caught in this net. It's certainly entirely possible that. That some things happened, but not necessarily everything that people are claiming. And even if somebody did mistreat person, a Alice and another person, Barbara then comes forward and says, I heard that now. I think he did that to me, too. I mean, you have to look at these individual cases and make some distinctions, because did those two people influence one another? Are some of the memories real and some not real? Those are the kinds of things that go on in some of these cases involving people who might be considered unpopular in our society today.
- [58:56]
Rebecca Sebastian
It's a very real tension between believing survivors and protecting due process. And that's where a lot of Elizabeth Loftus's work lives, in that uncomfortable space between justice and memory.
- [59:07]
Mike Kosper
Whereas some of our work on the show has been in the space where these stories get shaped not just by what happened, but by what we believe happened. Until we don't.
- [59:16]
Rebecca Sebastian
Until we don't. Fun fact. When I closed up my interview with Elizabeth, we talked off the record about making the show. And of course, she knows Ken Lanning and said to say hi. It was fun.
- [59:27]
Mike Kosper
Small world. All right, thanks, Rebecca. Devil in the Deep Blue Sea is a production of Christianity Today. It's hosted and written by Mike Kosper produced by Mike Kosper and Rebecca Sebastian with production assistance from Dawn Adams Sound design and mix engineering by TJ Hester Sound design, animation and video by Steve Scheidler Graphic design Nim Ben Rubin, Eric Petrick and Mike Kosper are executive producers of CT Media Podcasts. Matt Stevens is our senior producer. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review. Wherever you listen, you'll help more people find the show. Thanks for.