Episode 2: Marylyn Remembers

Summary

The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall (CBC)
Episode 2: "Marylyn Remembers"
October 27, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the origins and repercussions of the Satanic Panic in North America, focusing on the infamous book "Michelle Remembers." Host Sarah Marshall sits down with Marilyn Harris, the ex-wife of Dr. Lawrence Pazder—the psychiatrist behind "Michelle Remembers." Together with other voices, including Michelle Smith’s sister Cheryl Proby Ostman, the episode investigates the personal and cultural ripple effects set off by the book: how it tore apart families, distorted memories, and ignited mass fear. Through deeply personal interviews and careful narrative, Marshall illuminates both the private pain and lasting societal damage caused by the Satanic Panic.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Spark: "Sybil" and the Power of Suggestion

[01:10 - 02:31]

• Marilyn recounts watching the movie "Sybil" (about a woman with multiple personalities and recovered memories of abuse), which deeply moved her psychiatrist husband, Larry.
• Larry immediately saw parallels between "Sybil" and one of his patients, Michelle Smith, believing she might have repressed traumatic memories.

“He just watched it for a few minutes and he said, oh, I've got a patient just like that.”
— Marilyn Harris [02:40]

• This encounter leads Larry to contact Michelle, initiating the events that would birth "Michelle Remembers."

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2. "Michelle Remembers": The Book That Lit a Cultural Fire

[03:10 - 08:00]

• "Michelle Remembers" (1980) was co-authored by Dr. Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, alleging Michelle suffered ritualistic abuse at the hands of a satanic cult as a child—memories supposedly recovered with Larry’s help.
• The therapy tapes were emotionally intense, often consisting mostly of Michelle’s agonized screaming and crying.
• The book was marketed as a true story, endorsed (even tacitly by the Catholic Church), and became a media sensation, shaping the cultural landscape.

“The conditions were right, the kindling was everywhere. But Michelle and Larry lit the match.”
— Sarah Marshall [03:10]

• The alleged abuse stories are recounted in graphic detail, including animal sacrifices and deeply disturbing rituals, sometimes read in Michelle's own words.

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3. Family Reality vs. Book Mythmaking

[11:44 - 16:01]

• Cheryl Proby Ostman, Michelle Smith’s sister, gives a very different portrait of their childhood than the book.
• The Proby sisters were raised in a strict, sometimes fearful home, but nothing resembling satanic ritual abuse. Regular parental neglect or strictness was common for the era.

“We moved around every year and a half... I saw six homes in 10 years.”
— Cheryl Proby Ostman [12:25]

• Both sisters recall quirky childhood incidents (like hospital visits from eating household items), some of which appear distorted in the book.

• Cheryl and Marilyn both note that the book exaggerated and invented major details, turning the family’s mundane dysfunction into hellish fantasy.

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4. The Real Pain: Domestic Violence and Loss

[16:01 - 21:44]

• Cheryl describes genuine trauma—their father's alcoholism and abuse towards their mother, Virginia.

“It was hard seeing your mom being beaten up... you know, he just got so nasty when he drank.”
— Cheryl Proby Ostman [16:30]

• Virginia’s death (from cancer) during Cheryl and Michelle’s adolescence led to further family fracture, not ritual abuse.
• Both women emphasize the crushing silence about abuse and emotion in the mid-20th century, highlighting how this cultural context allowed for stories like "Michelle Remembers" to fill the void.

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5. The Aftermath: Book Fallout and False Memories

[22:08 - 24:06]

• After their mother’s death, the sisters drifted apart, and Michelle's life changed as she rebranded herself not only by marriage but via the "Michelle Remembers" persona.
• Cheryl recalls the confusion and doubt the book seeded, even within her—questioning her own reality and memory.

“I was lying in bed last night and I was thinking about how you create memories and how you create false memories... it totally distorted my thought.”
— Cheryl Proby Ostman [23:03]

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6. The Love Affair Behind the Panic

[25:22 - 36:09]

• The episode details how, beyond Michelle’s “memories,” the therapy led to an affair between Larry and Michelle—both married at the time, with devastating effects on Marilyn and Larry’s family.

“It wasn’t just like an affair. They were just joined together. He was totally, totally, totally, completely obsessed with her and her story. And he truly believed it.”
— Marilyn Harris [36:09]

• Marilyn describes a slow-motion loss, watching her husband become a stranger gripped by obsession.
• Personal belongings and life were gradually overtaken by Michelle’s presence, leading to hostility, confrontation, and ultimately, divorce.

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7. Investigating the "Truth" of the Book

[37:17 - 38:25]

• Marilyn did her own detective work, finding yearbook photos and school records definitively proving Michelle was not missing or held captive during the dates described in the book.

“She’s in the yearbook... we asked them, when is this picture being taken?... The neighbors had said that the mother attended church regularly. Sure enough, the records were there.”
— Marilyn Harris [37:43]

• Journalists and others also failed to corroborate the book's claims; there was a total absence of evidence for the described events.

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8. The Enduring Impact and Personal Pain

[38:25 - End]

• Marilyn shares the lasting impact: shame, grief, self-doubt, and the impossibility of recovering from betrayal by someone once loved.

“I don't know if I ever did recover. I don't think I ever did. I don't think you ever recover from something like that.”
— Marilyn Harris [39:19]

• Sarah offers a powerful metaphor: Marilyn tried heroically but futilely to “stop the fire” of the Panic at its source.

“You were the person at the very beginning who heroically tried to stop the fire before it got too big... you did what you could, and thank you for that...”
— Sarah Marshall [39:52]

• The episode closes with Sarah’s analysis: "Michelle Remembers" is most frightening not for its horror stories, but for how it reveals the ease with which personal and societal desires can conjure – and destroy – realities.

“It tells the story of a man who leaves his wife by starting a holy war and seems to have lost a little bit of his soul in the process.”
— Sarah Marshall [40:38]

• The actual cultural panic outlived the marriage: the book became required reading among law enforcement and social workers, infecting a generation with suspicion and fear of “recovered” satanic abuse “memories.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the origins of Michelle Remembers:

  “Michelle and Larry lit the match.” [03:10]

• On domestic violence and social secrecy:

  “In the 60s everything was pretty tight lipped, you know, it was a different era. You didn't talk about emotions, you know…”
  — Cheryl Proby Ostman [18:21]

• On the collapse of a marriage:

  “He became increasingly hostile, and he didn't seem to care. He didn't care about us anymore.”
  — Marilyn Harris [33:36]

• On the impossibility of closure:

  “Maybe he never cared for us. I don’t know, you know?”
  — Marilyn Harris [39:19]

• On the cycle of belief and destruction:

  “You were the person at the very beginning who heroically tried to stop the fire before it got too big.”
  — Sarah Marshall [39:52]

• On the spread of Satanic Panic:

  “Michelle Remembers became a trusted source for social workers and police officers... so did the idea that Satanists could be out there anywhere.”
  — Sarah Marshall [42:47]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:10] – Movie "Sybil" sparks Larry’s obsession
• [03:10] – Marilyn describes Larry’s fixation on Michelle’s case
• [05:26, 05:59, 06:49] – Excerpts from "Michelle Remembers"
• [11:44] – Cheryl introduced, family dynamic debunked
• [16:30] – Cheryl on father’s abuse
• [20:22] – Virginia’s (mother’s) illness and death
• [23:03] – Cheryl discusses confusion and false memories post-book
• [25:22, 27:26, 29:06] – Marilyn on her marriage and Larry's transformation
• [33:36] – The marriage falls apart
• [37:17] – Marilyn investigates and disproves book’s claims
• [39:19 - 40:26] – Marilyn on never recovering, Sarah’s "trying to stop the fire" metaphor
• [42:17, 42:47] – The book’s social legacy and Dr. Pazder’s rationale

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Tone & Style

The episode is empathetic and reflective, combining investigative journalism with emotional storytelling. The speakers, especially Marilyn and Cheryl, are candid and raw, their insights underlining the human cost behind media spectacle. Sarah Marshall’s narration is both sharp and compassionate, drawing broader connections between personal trauma and societal phenomena.

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Recommended For:
Anyone seeking to understand the real lives upended by the Satanic Panic, the dangers of unexamined belief, and the devastating ripple effect of false narratives and “recovered memories.” This episode is both a cautionary tale and a moving oral history.

Transcript

[Narrator/Host]

A new season of Love Me is here. Real stories of real complicated relationships.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

It's not even like a gender. I mean, it's wrapped up in gender, but it's just. It's just a really deep self hate.

[Sarah Marshall]

I think I cried almost every day.

[Marilyn Harris]

I just threw myself on the floor. He's coming on really straight.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's like he's trying to date you all of a sudden.

[Dr. Lawrence Pazder]

Yeah, and I do look like my mother.

[Narrator/Host]

Love Me. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast.

[Marilyn Harris]

We always got along. We never fought. And we never fought during our marriage.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Really?

[Marilyn Harris]

Well, I don't remember fighting with him until this situation came along.

[Sarah Marshall]

This is Marilyn Harris. She's talking here about her late ex husband. The couple were married for about 18 years. They had three sons and a daughter. And by all accounts, they had a pretty typical life in their small city of Victoria, British Columbia. Until one day a minor coincidence changed their lives.

[Marilyn Harris]

I was watching TV and he came into the house and Sybil was on. It was a story about this woman she was supposed to be like as a child. She was tortured by her mother and then she gets a recovered memory when she saw the psychiatrist.

[Sarah Marshall]

Sybil is a more than three hour long made for TV movie starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward. It first aired in 1976 and was adapted from the 1973 book by Flora Rita Schreiber. It told the story of a young woman who entered therapy to discover that her mind had been split into 16 distinct personalities by horrific childhood abuse. And furthermore, that the only way to integrate these personalities and to live a happy life was to remember and relive these memories with the help of a heroic therapist. Both the book and the movie were blockbuster successes. Who does those drawings?

[Marilyn Harris]

You do. But you do them as other people do. You understand? You do them as other parts of yourself.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

No, I don't.

[Marilyn Harris]

We're still children. No, I don't.

[Narrator/Host]

It's true.

[Sarah Marshall]

No, it's not.

[Marilyn Harris]

And I said, gee, this is the strangest little show. I don't really believe it that much.

[Sarah Marshall]

The movie made a different impression on Marilyn's husband, Larry. Larry was a psychiatrist and also a devout Catholic.

[Marilyn Harris]

He didn't watch it for even five minutes. He just watched it for a few minutes and he said, oh, I've got a patient just like that.

[Sarah Marshall]

The patient that Sybil reminded him of was a woman named Michelle who had come to him for treatment for depression following her third miscarriage.

[Marilyn Harris]

So he phoned her and he gave her a phone number. That's when it all started.

[Sarah Marshall]

Marilyn's husband Larry is Dr. Lauren's pastor and together he and Michelle wrote a book called Michelle Remembers. It alleged that as a child of five, Michelle experienced severe abuse at the hands of a satanic cult and that she had forgotten about this abuse until her therapy with Larry on unlocked her memories. And it was this story that would ignite the satanic panic. The conditions were right, the kindling was everywhere. But Michelle and Larry lit the match.

[Marilyn Harris]

He was completely obsessed with her and her story and he truly believed it.

[Sarah Marshall]

What is it like to watch your family fall apart because your husband claims he's feeling fighting a holy war? Or to be a woman seeking help for your grief only to instead be given a lead role in that holy war? I'm Sarah Marshall and this is the Devil youl Know.

[Marilyn Harris]

And in British Columbia it was in.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Victoria where the case of Michelle Smith was documented.

[Dr. Lawrence Pazder]

Under treatment, she unearthed childhood memories of.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

A year spent with a coven of Satanists.

[Sarah Marshall]

Joining me now from Victoria is Michelle Smith, a one time victim of abuse by a satanic cult and Dr. Lawrence Pazder, the psychiatrist who helped her come to terms with that nightmare. They are co authors of the book Michelle Remembers. Michelle Remembers tells the story of a woman who returns to therapy following a miscarriage and whose therapist cannot seem to understand why she would need more therapy when he already did such a good job the first time. The book describes Michelle re experiencing her childhood trauma in what it calls the depths. A state that seems a lot like hypnosis but is never named. That throughout this episode you'll hear passages from Michelle Remembers. Read for us by Jamie Loftus. Here's one.

[Narrator/Host]

It was always at bedtime. The nurse has her cloak on. The one with the mark on the back like a spider with a tail like an arrow at the bottom. The man comes in with a white kitten. Those poor kittens. They're always white kittens and different fingers and pieces like that to make the white thing red.

[Sarah Marshall]

The images Michelle first described in these often dreamlike sessions reminded Larry of a coven, perhaps even of Satanists.

[Narrator/Host]

The others started doing this funny dance and the nurse was doing it with them. They bent and took the kittens in their teeth, holding the cats by the napes of their necks. Now they were biting the kittens and the cats were howling and they were pulling the kittens apart with their teeth, chewing at their paws to make them come free, stopping only to spit out the hair.

[Sarah Marshall]

This book is absolutely horrifying to read once you get through the opening sections. Setting up the plot and getting Michelle situated in therapy. You spend most of your time reading transcriptions of Michelle describing what purportedly happened to her as a child. And whether Michelle is remembering or imagining the effect on her is devastating.

[Narrator/Host]

Screaming hysterically, Michelle tore away and leaped off the stone slab. They had put her next to a dead baby. Frantic with fear, she ran across the room through the chanting circle and made it to the round bed. She had to help the baby. She knew they didn't like crosses. Michelle still had the cross in her hands, and she thought it was safe because she was holding it. Malachi couldn't take it from her. Then he raised his fist, raising her arms along with it, and drove the base of the cross down upon the body of the baby.

[Sarah Marshall]

As the story became more complex, one element remained consistent. Michelle was only being abused by the Satanists because her mother had given her to them.

[Narrator/Host]

The people in the circle were still swaying and moving rhythmically, but they were chanting louder and louder, and they were getting scarier and scarier. Michelle looked up and saw her mother at the front. She was sitting in a chair like a princess.

[Sarah Marshall]

The therapy itself began to resemble torture. And the tapes of these sessions are mostly Michelle screaming, crying and incoherent. For some reason, Larry and Michelle decided that actually this would all make for a really good book. And so in about 1978, they met with publisher Thomas Congdon. In his time at Doubleday, Congdon had edited and shaped Peter Benchley's Jaws. In other words, he knew how to midwife a bestseller, and he certainly got them. Publicity People Weekly and the National Enquirer ran breathless reviews of the book and the story behind it. Michelle and Larry gave radio interviews, went on TV talk shows, all before the book had even been published. So when Michelle Remembers hit the shelves in 1980, a huge audience was ready and waiting for it. Here's Michelle herself in an interview with the CBC in 1988. When I was four or five, at first, when I was taken by this group of people for 14 months, I didn't have any idea at all what they were about, except they were adults who increasingly hurt me more and more and started to do things in a pattern and with costumes. They would put me in cages, they would sacrifice animals. They would have a lot of candles and chanting and bizarre things I had never seen. And again, you know, things we've heard about, you know, with eating feces and orgies and dismembering fetuses. These were things that you experienced? That's right. Splashed across the COVID of this mass market Paperback was the claim that this was the, quote, shockingly true story of the old ultimate evil. It even had the tacit endorsement of the Catholic Church with a statement from the bishop of Victoria's diocese in the book, along with the sensational claims of the story itself, which you've been hearing. All of this helped Michelle Remembers become a smash hit. But the story Michelle and Larry presented went beyond their personal experience because they claimed that satanic cults were alive and well, not just in Victoria, but across the entirety of North America. Here's Larry speaking with journalist Jack Webster on his Show Webster in 1980. Who are these people?

[Dr. Lawrence Pazder]

Well, they're a secret organization. They're a secret society. A secret society does not reveal the identity of the people or the ways of their practices.

[Sarah Marshall]

Michelle did not respond to our outreach for this episode.

[Marilyn Harris]

And.

[Sarah Marshall]

And Larry passed away in 2004. So who were Michelle and Larry? Not the characters in the book, but the real people, according to those who knew them best. And who was this mother who would supposedly give her only daughter up to Satanists?

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

And the funny thing is, in I was reading on Facebook, people that grew up in Victoria and they all said, did you ever have this happen where your parents would drive up to the soup pub on Saturday night and leave you in the car? And yes, it happened all the time to us too. So it was a normal thing to do that your parents would drive up to a pub and roll the windows down and leave your kids sitting in the car for hours.

[Sarah Marshall]

And not even.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Come out and check on us, as.

[Sarah Marshall]

Long as the windows aren't up. This is Cheryl Proby Ostman.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

I am Michelle Smith's sister and I'm from Victoria, bc.

[Sarah Marshall]

As a book, Michelle Remembers takes creative liberties with the family biography. For example, Cheryl is the youngest of three sisters. Michelle is in the middle. But in the book, Michelle has become an only child.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

I'm a tomboy. Michelle was pretty tomboy. Yeah, she was pretty tomboyish. Climbing trees, you know, and getting into trouble, do you think?

[Sarah Marshall]

Because I feel like people are always like, you know, boys are so messy. Like little girls are less disgusting.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Oh, no, right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, girls are disgusting. The family moved around a lot during Cheryl's childhood.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

We moved around every year and a half. We were on Standard street and went to Townley, Taylor, Doncaster, Philip Place and Richardson before I was 10. So I saw six homes in 10 years.

[Sarah Marshall]

What was that like for you? Like, by the time you were 10, you know, how did you feel?

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

I think the hardest adjustment was going to new schools because I was Shy. I had a hard time, you know, I had friends and so of course you'd leave your friends and have to start all over again.

[Sarah Marshall]

One source of stability Cheryl remembers is her mother, Virginia.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

My mom's. I remember my mom's closet. She had these wonderful, beautiful fur lined slippers. I kept saying to her, why'd you wear them? Why'd you wear them? So I'm saving them for a special occasion. Well, she died. She never did any of them, which is sad.

[Sarah Marshall]

Was she someone who was keeping up appearances?

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Always. I mean, Momma was extremely attractive. She'd go to the doctor and he would give her methamphetamines to lose weight. But I remember she had these alligator purse and alligator shoes. I have the alligator purse.

[Sarah Marshall]

What do you remember her doing?

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Baking a lot and ironing. I mean, doing housework. I mean, it was just, you know, she was. Back in those days, everybody dressed up. I mean, she was always dressed up even at home. Nylon and girdles, things like that. Horrible stuff. But she. Oh, she made special cookies. I remember that. These chocolate coconut, oatmeal drops. They were so good.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. The cookies of the 50s and 60s are such an art, I think, because I feel like they were all being dreamed up by individual housewives and then being spread around gradually. Mm. The mother in the book has a pseudonym, Jessica. And Michelle remembers her very differently.

[Narrator/Host]

Jessica gave birth to a little girl. Disappointed, they called the baby Michelle. They often spoke of how much they had hoped she would be a boy.

[Sarah Marshall]

And here's how the book describes Michelle's father, who was given the pseudonym, Eric.

[Narrator/Host]

Harding, some 10 years older than Jessica. Harding resembled her father in many ways. He had the same kind of virile good looks and he was every bit as domineering as his father in law.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

He was strict. I mean, he was not a, you know, jump in your lap type of dad. You know, like go to bed, things like that. You know, I was his favorite. I remember he kid with me and called me a sticky fingers. That's what it was because I was always stealing things. Michelle and him, we didn't like each other. They, you know, we avoided that as much as possible, but we went along what we had to.

[Narrator/Host]

She's a very difficult child. One of them said. We're going to have to tie your hands down. Said the other. She just wants attention. The first person said.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's striking to hear Cheryl describe her childhood with Michelle because often there are parallels to the book. Some really weird details match.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Michelle and I were always eating things. So Michelle And I ate a big, huge thing of cod liver oil. We spent more time at the hospital getting our stomachs pumped. And it was embarrassing that mom had actually switched hospitals all the time because it was embarrassing.

[Narrator/Host]

Michelle attended school in Victoria, where she did well, except for her multiplication tables. And there was one small problem. She ate erasers. She could not explain why.

[Sarah Marshall]

But one big truth does line up with what Cheryl remembers. The girls often lived in fear.

[Narrator/Host]

Her parents marriage was a stormy one. There were nights when her father erupted in drunken rages and beat her mother. Michelle used to cower in her bed, frightened that he might kill her mother, feeling that she had to stop him, knowing that she could not.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

I mean, the moment they start arguing, the police would show up shortly afterwards sometimes. And it was hard seeing your mom being beaten up. You know, it was just. He just got so nasty when he drank. My dad was just downright mean. He came home and he had been drinking beer and he was watching a football game. He would be tapping on the. On the table for mama to bring him another drink. He was like, everybody had to disappear. You know, it was his domain. This was his house. And of course, it always escalated into something. It never ended peacefully. Never.

[Sarah Marshall]

And was there any. Did you feel as a child that there was any way of predicting when your father would. Would become abusive? Or was it sort of, you know, out of the clear blue sky, Every.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Holiday was ruined by his alcohol. You destroy the.

[Narrator/Host]

Eventually, Michelle came to understand that nothing was the way it appeared. No time or activity was safe. She would be taken for a nice drive, then tortured with the sight of her mother. The nurse would give her a bowl of soup for lunch, but the bowl would have a mass of bugs or worms at the bottom. Michelle would eat a few mouthfuls before she saw them, then vomit up what she had already swallowed. Eventually she just refused to eat at all.

[Sarah Marshall]

What did you think about when people started. I mean, this is my sense from history that people actually started talking about abusive husbands and living in homes where everything was fine in the front and scary inside, that there was more kind of talking about that as a political issue for women and people talking about it at all as if it mattered. Did that feel like anything to you or.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

You know, in the 60s and 70s, we still didn't talk about it. It was, you know, it was just starting, I think in the 70s when I was in high school, we started comparison our notes and then realizing that, you know, how dysfunctional a lot of our friends were, parents were and how a lot of them were Alcoholics. And in the 60s everything was pretty tight lipped, you know, it was a different era. You didn't talk about emotions, you know, you didn't say, oh, I'm depressed, I don't feel like doing this. You know, for me, if I'm, you know, having a bad day, sometimes I just go back to bed and watch tv. I don't remember ever my mom doing that, you know, I don't think they did, you know, just you just did laundry and cleaned the house and did the housewife chores and cooked and baked and that's about it, you know, was.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, you know, my mom was born in 1948, so she's this generation of women kind of growing up having been in these like very close lipped families where often a lot was going on behind the scenes but nobody could talk about it. And was there a world in which she could have gone off and as a single parent without a man, or was that just kind of unimaginable at that time?

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

I think that was unimaginable back in these days because it was, it was, I think you were frowned upon to be a single parent.

[Narrator/Host]

She was so upset, so weak, so hurt. And the substances that had been painted on her had dried and were hard to get off. And they made the washcloth dirty and the water dirty. And she began to feel that she would never be clean again.

[Sarah Marshall]

Cheryl's dad often disappeared temporarily, but by 1964 he had stopped living with the family altogether. Cheryl was about 9 and Michelle was about 14. But that same year, Virginia's health began to decline.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

So in June I gone to school and mom fell and couldn't get up and she was in such pain. So they took her in the hospital and that's when they did exploratory surgery. And she was riddled with cancer, so they just closed her up. And so they started radiation treatment right away. And that was June, so. And she was dead by November.

[Narrator/Host]

There was her mother. Beautiful, her cheeks flushed, her red hair spread out against the back of the large green chair she was sitting in. Michelle tried to wave at her mother without attracting the attention of the others to get her mother to see her. She couldn't. She tried and she tried, her heart breaking, desperate for her mother. But Michelle couldn't make her mother notice. Her mother's eyes were closed. She seemed to be in pain.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

She went into a coma. So none of his children saw her for two weeks before she died. So the last time I had my visit with my mom was that I got up in her Bed and by accident spilt some water on her where she was being treated. And she got really upset with me, really mad and. But she didn't mean to. She was, you know, so. But that was my last memory.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And how old were you?

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Nine.

[Narrator/Host]

Nine.

[Sarah Marshall]

The sisters were split up and sent off to boarding schools. Cheryl rarely saw her dad. And Michelle and Cheryl's already distant relationship grew more so. Cheryl left Victoria, and Michelle eventually settled down with her new husband, Doug.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

I had moved to San Francisco, so I didn't have a whole lot of contact with her. And she had moved to Shanagon Lake, and her and Doug were building a house up there.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's somewhere here in the late 70s where the real Michelle Proby, Cheryl's sister, becomes Michelle Smith. And not just by marrying Doug and taking his last name, but by becoming the character Michelle Smith that we meet in Michelle Remembers. Michelle first came to Larry for therapy in 1973. She stopped after a while, but came back in 1976 following a miscarriage.

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Somewhere in between that time, they thought about writing this book. And they went, I guess, to the publisher shortly after that, when she came to San Francisco to announce that they were in the midst of writing this book.

[Sarah Marshall]

Did you read it? Did you kind of start it in a sense of like, okay, let's see what's in this? Like, did you finish it? What was that experience like?

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

I did finish it. And at first I thought, could this have happened? You know, I mean, it questioned it because it's like, we had such a strange childhood anyway, so it's like, well, maybe that really did happen. And then I talked to my other sister, and she goes, don't you think I would know about it if it happened? You know, she says, Michelle never disappeared for a year. You know, she made this all up. I was lying in bed last night and I was thinking about how you create memories and how you create false memories. And I'm thinking, did that really happen? You know, and now I couldn't decipher whether that was really true or whether I just made it up. It was it. It totally distorted my thought.

[Sarah Marshall]

Hmm. Yeah. Like, did you ever really get to talk about it, or was it just kind of that?

[Cheryl Proby Ostman]

Not really. We talk about maybe in generalities, like, what if they had a TV show coming up or something like that, or they were being harassed by the newspapers. That's when they started changing their story a little bit about how it was her way of surviving her childhood.

[Narrator/Host]

Here it was the day after, and she was sitting in the kitchen a bowl of cereal in front of her with her mother. It was just like a pretend. Her mother was acting as if nothing had happened.

[Sarah Marshall]

Despite the extreme tortures the book describes the Satanists enacting, what always seems to cause Michelle the most painful is the betrayal of her protector, Michelle's mother. The Michelle of the book is a girl who has been broken not by the Satanists, but by the deep belief that she can never be loved and that she has lost her mother. Hi, I'm Sarah Nicole Landry and I'm.

[Narrator/Host]

The host of the Papaya Podcast where each week I ask curious questions to people with incredible stories or expertise in their fields. I'm somebody who has found so much inspiration in storytelling and learning from them, and I wanted to bring that to a podcast where each week we walk away learning something that might just change.

[Sarah Marshall]

Our lives for the better.

[Narrator/Host]

Check us out every Monday on the Papaya Podcast. See you there.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, so far this is a wild story, but there's even more to it than just what's in the book. And yes, there is a lot to unpack there. But what the book didn't say is that in the process of this torture therapy, Larry and Michelle had fallen in love, despite the fact that both of them were already married to other people.

[Narrator/Host]

The psychiatrist was shocked when he saw Michelle, a pretty young woman of 27 with a heart shaped face, a delicate mouth and bountiful brown curls. She had been vital and bright the last time he had seen her, but now the face as pale as the pillowcase and the big brown eyes were full of tears.

[Sarah Marshall]

And in case it wasn't clear to the average reader in the 80s that something more was going on here, Lawrence.

[Narrator/Host]

Pazder was warm, manly, soft spoken, what people who live elsewhere consider the typical Westerner. He was live and athletic, a tennis player and skier, and had earned a brown belt in judo. His hair was brown, beginning to turn silver.

[Sarah Marshall]

People Weekly published a story on Michelle remembers in 1980 which shed some light on what the therapeutic process involved. It featured a full page photo of Larry and Michelle showing Larry therapeutically hugging Michelle after she had therapeutically taken her top off. The image is from one of their videotaped sessions in 1976 or 1977, when again, both of them were married to other people.

[Marilyn Harris]

So we kind of knew each other for seven years before we were married.

[Sarah Marshall]

How old were you both?

[Marilyn Harris]

Well, I was only about 13 years old and he was in. He was 17. He was just starting grade 12.

[Sarah Marshall]

Here again is Marilyn Harris, who was married to Larry from 1961 to 1979. They had four children together.

[Marilyn Harris]

We were staying at a lake that's nearby Edmonton, and so was he. We were just fooling around, pushing people in the lake, actually off the pier. We just kept in touch after that. He graduated from medicine a year after I graduated from nursing and we got married in 1961.

[Sarah Marshall]

I wonder about committing to marry someone and sort of thinking about them in those terms. Were there things about him that made you think, yes, I want to marry this man and I want to raise my children with this man.

[Marilyn Harris]

I couldn't imagine myself being with anybody else. And if I wouldn't have married him, I probably would have never married.

[Sarah Marshall]

The first few years of marriage were eventful. They had a son. Larry took a job at a mental hospital in rural alberta. And then they jetted off to an even more remote hospital run by an Irish missionary order in Nigeria. That lasted about a year until Marilyn and their young son contracted malaria. And by 1968, after stints in montreal and Edmonton, the young family was back in Victoria.

[Marilyn Harris]

We always got along. We never fought and we never fought during our marriage, really. You know, it didn't matter where we were. Even when we were off in the bush in Nigeria, we were always happy together. It just seemed natural for us to be together. You know, it wasn't anything dramatic or anything like that. It's just like two people growing up together.

[Sarah Marshall]

I guess maybe the past we can't get back to is always a little rose colored. But Marilyn remembers much of it fondly. And so when Larry and michelle first met as doctor and patient in 1973, nothing seemed unusual. And Marilyn didn't hear much about Michelle until that day in 1976 when Larry saw Sybil on TV. Sybil.

[Marilyn Harris]

But it just seemed to me that it was over the top, you know, that it was highly unlikely that it really happened. But he believed it. Whatever the latest thing in psychiatry was, he would often go for that.

[Sarah Marshall]

Michelle and Larry's relationship soon began to cross professional boundaries and bled into Larry's personal life, and Marilyn's for that matter. Marilyn remembers michelle calling the house constantly to talk to Larry, even when they were on a family holiday in Mexico.

[Narrator/Host]

Pazder was shocked. He had been having a wonderful vacation full of swimming and sun. He had thought about Michelle, but only peripherally, as for example, once when he had seen a pigtailed little girl playing on the beach. But as he listened to Michelle blurting out the fragments of memory through her coughing, he was grateful she had called. When she said, I'm not going to make it. He believed her.

[Marilyn Harris]

He did very little talking, if any, Just very minimally said anything. It was all her doing all the talking. Then after, he would just be like in a. Just stunned, totally stunned, as if he was in some kind of a trance or something. Afterwards, he'd just put his head in his hands and bend down, and he'd say, this is terrible. This is just terrible, terrible, terrible. And sometimes he'd even start to cry. He would cry and he'd say, it's terrible. And as time went on and that, you know, I said. I would say, you know, I didn't believe it. And he was just almost obsessed.

[Narrator/Host]

Dr. Pazder had been anxious to have his wife comprehend something of the nature of this extraordinary endeavor so that she would understand why he was seeing less of his family these days and spending so much additional professional time with one patient. He had wanted his wife to understand how important the work was and to have her support. He could not have spoken about the case, even to his own wife, without michelle's permission. She had freely, though uneasily, given it. Dr. Pazder began to feel that he had perhaps made another mistake in telling michelle about the mistake he made in telling his wife.

[Sarah Marshall]

Larry began to disappear from his family's lives. But oddly enough, Michelle became a near constant presence. Marilyn remembers constantly seeing michelle around town, the daily phone calls from her continuing.

[Marilyn Harris]

My mom took the kids because she wanted them to get away, so that they. Because it was overwhelming our life. She took them to a family reunion in texas, and they turned the TV on, and there they were on TV in dallas. He was very seldom ever home. He would come then. He might be home a couple of days. One day or something. Off they'd go. He was here or there, but if he said, oh, we're going to new york. Well, he'd come back with match folders that he'd been actually in hawaii. So we'd. That he wasn't in new york.

[Sarah Marshall]

Did he seem like the man that you had married?

[Marilyn Harris]

No, he seemed completely different. And he became very hostile because I didn't believe it. He became increasingly hostile, and he didn't seem to care. He didn't care about us anymore.

[Sarah Marshall]

When did you know that your marriage was over or that you were ready to be divorced?

[Marilyn Harris]

I think. Well, just before I sued for divorce, we had another house, and myself and the kids had been working on this other house, Kind of doing renovations on it and that sort of thing. I went over. I was getting a drill or saw or something that we had Been working with, you know, and there we saw Michelle was living in there and she had my vacuum cleaner and she had a lot of my household things, dishes and book and all that sort. So I think, oh, I'm going to take all my stuff back. I took my. I got the drill that we wanted and I said that's it. There's no point, there's no point in this anymore.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, in talking about Michelle for a minute, she was this presence in your life for so long who seems to have been so inescapable. And I wonder, did you ever try and convey to her what this was all like for you or just in some way try to make her stay? Was it possible to communicate with her? What was that like?

[Marilyn Harris]

Yeah, I did confront her a couple of times, but Larry was completely against me. He took her side.

[Sarah Marshall]

Each time Marilyn says she told Michelle.

[Marilyn Harris]

Stay away from us. She didn't really say anything, you know, but I threw something, threw my shoe at her actually one time and said, just get out of. Just leave us alone. Leave my husband alone. They were very unpleasant encounters, actually. You know, I mean by that time I was really quite terribly upset. There was no point in the marriage. It was, it just was hopeless. A hopeless situation. And he was, he was completely obsessed. It wasn't just like an affair. They were just joined together. He was totally, totally, totally, completely obsessed with her and her story. And he truly believed it.

[Sarah Marshall]

By 1979, Marilyn knew it was over.

[Marilyn Harris]

Although we were very happy. I don't know before, was he always like that? And I was just unaware. I don't know, you know, you don't know what the past was or what. What was ever. Was anything ever really what you thought it was. I don't know. Maybe I was just really a stupid person, I guess. I don't know.

[Sarah Marshall]

I think you're the only smart person in this story.

[Marilyn Harris]

Well, I don't know if I was so. But my mom was. If I wouldn't have had my mom, my cousins, they were there, they were supportive. I don't think we would have made it through. It was like a nightmare. We didn't have all the specifics to really investigate until that book came out. But then I went down to the library and I looked up all the addresses where her family had lived and to where she was when she's supposed to be missing.

[Sarah Marshall]

Using old fashioned gumshoe detective work, Marilyn had found records of Michelle attending school, photographed looking, if not happy, then at least healthy. During the roughly 15 month period that the book claimed Michelle had Spent being tortured by satanists, including several weeks of captivity inside a large devil statue.

[Marilyn Harris]

So we went down to the school. Sure enough, the school. She's in the yearbook. We asked them, when is this picture being taken? And you could see by the trees in that. And they said that was in the fall. And the neighbors had said that the mother attended Christchurch cathedral, the Anglican cathedral, regularly. Sure enough, the records were there.

[Sarah Marshall]

Marilyn collected binders of documents, photos, articles. She even tried contacting church officials in Vancouver about her concerns. Later, other journalists attempted to verify stories from the book against newspaper reports from the time, but could find no record.

[Marilyn Harris]

I just felt so terrible that this could have happened and that people had their lives destroyed and everything. He's the father of my children. You can't change that. We tried our best in that sense to do something, but you might say I'm very ashamed of it. It's something that was really hard to explain. So I never really talked about it to anybody. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

I feel like this story is about the things people have to believe and can't let themselves stop believing. And you're someone who was, you know, believed in your marriage and believed in this life you had built and had that taken away from you. And so how did you recover from all this loss?

[Marilyn Harris]

I don't know if I ever did recover. I don't think I ever did. I don't think you ever recover from something like that. You always felt really bad, you know, I always felt really bad. But then now, like I just said, I don't know what was real and what wasn't real. Was he always like that was the person that I loved. Was he actually didn't exist. Maybe he didn't exist. Maybe he was always telling lies. Maybe he never cared for us. I don't know. You know?

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, I mean, for what it's worth, I was, you know, just getting ready to talk to you today. I was thinking about just the story of the great Chicago fire, starting with Mrs. O' Leary's cow, you know, and I was thinking about how, the way I see it and the way, as far as I can tell, it happened, you were the person at the very beginning who heroically tried to stop the fire before it got too big. And, you know, I get you did what you could, and thank you for that, and we would not have wanted to do this without you.

[Marilyn Harris]

Oh, is that right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Thank you so much.

[Marilyn Harris]

You're more than welcome.

[Sarah Marshall]

Larry and Michelle were married until his death in 2004. Reading this book, it occurred to me that Michelle had managed a truly impressive feat, at least, if my analysis was correct, that she had fallen in love with her therapist and told a story in which he had to leave his family in order to save her because it was what God wanted him to do. It amounts to a kind of jiu jitsu defense where the devout Catholicism of the person you're having an affair with ends up being an advantage to you. And whether my analysis is right, that is what happened. He did become a true believer, and he did leave his family. Michelle Remembers is a scary book to read, but not for the reasons it thinks it is. It tells the story of a man who leaves his wife by starting a holy war and seems to have lost a little bit of his soul in the process. It's also a story that reveals more than it seems to know about the toll of the patriarchy on generations of women, about the cycle of trauma and the mundane horror of realizing that the person you shared a childhood, a home or a bed with has become a stranger to you. But in 1980, that wasn't a common takeaway from Michelle Remembers. There were more pressing matters at hand. Take it from Larry Pazder himself, it's.

[Dr. Lawrence Pazder]

Very difficult for us to even comprehend the kind of bizarre things that can be done to a child, and we don't want to believe that. The first thing we want to do is to push it away. The hard evidence is difficult to find because if a child is sacrificed, that child's body isn't going to be left. If it's an orthodox satanic cult, they're going to burn the body and they're going to to eat it during ceremony so they'll leave no evidence around. The people who are doing this at a sophisticated level are very careful in their activities.

[Sarah Marshall]

The book wasn't a smash hit on the scale of Jaws or even Sybil, but its presence in bookstores and its two authors publicity tours brought the term satanic ritual abuse into the cultural bloodstream. Even though it was marketed as a trashy paperback, Michelle Remembers became a trusted source for social workers and police officers in the US and as the book spread, so did the idea that Satanists could be out there anywhere, waiting and ready to steal your child and that lurking in your own subconscious were hidden memories not just of abuse, but of satanic abuse. Thank you for listening to the W know. Our producer is Mary Stephanhagen. Fact Checking by Katherine Barner Production assistants by Nicole Ortiz Special thanks to Liz McArthur at CBC. Victoria, your voice actor in this episode was Jamie Loftus. In the previous episode. You heard the vocal talents of River Butcher, Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbs. I've been your host, Sarah Marshall. Sound design by Evan Kelly and Julia Whitman. Roch Ni Nair is our coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. The clips from Cybill are copyright Warner Bros. Television. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is Manager of Growth for CBC Podcasts. Arif Nurani is Director of CBC Podcasts. Listen to every episode early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel. For early and ad free listening, subscribe to the CBC True Crime Premium Channel on Apple Podcasts.

[Marilyn Harris]

Foreign for more CBC Podcasts, go to CBC CA Podcasts.