Remembering Satan, Page 4

  Schoening had not known Sandy well until then, having met her only occasionally, at the sheriff’s office annual Christmas parties and summer picnics, and he was surprised at how deeply her agony affected him. The contrast between Sandy’s emotional collapse and Paul’s puzzled detachment was especially distressing. It had been a long and troubling day; but Schoening found that this, unlike most cases he had handled, was one he couldn’t leave at the office. That night, he had the first of a series of nightmares.

  3

  COUNTY G.O.P. LEADER FACES SEX-ASSAULT CHARGE,” the front page of the Olympian proclaimed the next morning. The names of the victims were withheld, in accordance with the newspaper’s policy, but Olympia is a small town, and anyone who wanted to know the details had probably already heard them and had also heard that the police were interviewing the children in Sandy’s day-care business, which she had immediately closed. In the chaos of the moment, few who knew Sandy remembered that November 29 was her forty-third birthday.

  Sheriff Edwards was well aware of the consequences of seeming to protect one of his own—especially a political appointee whom he had jumped through the ranks and made one of his chief deputies. Rather than turn the matter over to another agency, however, Edwards decided to have his own department conduct the investigation. He hoped to ward off criticism by inviting a couple of detectives from other police departments in the area to participate, while maintaining control in his own department. This decision would prove to be the first of many mistakes. The Thurston County Sheriff’s Office is a modest operation—at the time, 73 officers served a county of 165,000 residents—and a personal crisis in one employee’s family affected everyone else. No matter how objective Ingram’s co-workers might try to be, their passions were instantly engaged. They felt surprised, embarrassed, and betrayed by their colleague. This was not merely one family’s tragedy but a catastrophe for the morale of the whole department. To some extent, they, too, were victims in the case.

  The investigative team Edwards put together included some of the best officers in the county. Every morning, and many afternoons, the team met in the conference room in the sheriff’s office to discuss the case and divide up assignments. This room would become the scene of many agonizing debates. Seated around the table were Joe Vukich, dark and handsome but still baby-faced despite his mustache; Brian Schoening, who would fill the room with cigarette smoke and the washboard sound of his smoker’s voice; Loreli Thompson, a detective who handled sex crimes for the Lacey Police Department; and, for a while, Detective Paul Johnson of the Olympia Police Department. As the investigation lengthened, Johnson dropped out; his department could not afford to lose him for months on end. Thurston County was small enough that every cop knew every other cop—by reputation, if not personally—and the detectives in this room represented the county’s entire sex-crimes investigative force. They were used to cooperating with each other in special cases. An expert from the state patrol came in to help set up a computer program that could sort and classify the immense amount of data the detectives would eventually assemble. Overseeing the team was the most experienced investigator in the sheriff’s office, Sergeant Tom Lynch, a tough and likable man who was head of detectives and would be the one person responsible for reading every bit of material and trying to make sense of it. Like Vukich and McClanahan—and Ingram, for that matter—Lynch had a dark mustache, the male cop’s fashion statement.

  Ordinarily, Lynch would have been in complete control of the investigation; but with the political implications of the Ingram case, and the public-relations problems posed by having a department investigate one of its own high-ranking officers, Undersheriff McClanahan unofficially took charge of the case. His usual duties were almost entirely administrative, so his active involvement was exceptional and seen by some in the room as unwanted meddling. McClanahan’s perceptions of what occurred would shape and define the investigation, even though he only occasionally participated in the interrogations and rarely went into the field. He became the department’s spokesman on the subject; and as the investigation deepened and broadened beyond what anyone could have imagined, he became more and more attached to the case. He had personal reasons for doing so: Ingram was a friend and a colleague (if also a rival), and McClanahan was perhaps closer to Ingram’s family than anyone else on the force. He had felt a particular attachment to Julie when she was younger; he had always thought of her as his “little buddy.” Ingram’s revelations caused McClanahan to believe that his special relationship to Julie had filled a void in her life caused by her father’s brutal breach of trust. (For her part, Julie did not remember having such a close relationship with McClanahan, but she came to accept that it must have been true.) Throughout the investigation, McClanahan saw his role on the team as being a voice for the victims.

  On the morning after his arrest, Paul Ingram met with Richard Peterson, a Tacoma psychologist with a brusque, authoritative manner who often worked with the local police. Peterson would become an unofficial but highly significant member of the team. He first interviewed Ingram to determine his mental state and whether it was safe for him to be at large. As they talked about the case, Ingram asked why, if he had committed these heinous acts, he had no memory of them. Peterson told him that it was not uncommon for sexual offenders to bury the memories of their crimes because they were simply too horrible to consider. He went on to say that Ingram himself had probably been abused as a child. Peterson suggested that Ingram might recall being molested by an uncle, or even by his father. It would have happened when Paul was about five years of age, because that’s how old his own children had been when he started to abuse them. Ingram said that the only sexual memory he could dredge up from his early childhood was his mother’s cautioning him not to scratch his crotch in public. According to Ingram, Peterson then assured him that once he confessed, the repressed memories would come flooding back (although, once again, there’s no way of establishing that as fact). But he had confessed already, Ingram said, and he didn’t remember any more today than he had remembered yesterday. Peterson didn’t have an answer for that; however, Ingram asked if he would attend the afternoon interrogation with Schoening and Vukich—perhaps Peterson could unblock whatever it was that was keeping him from remembering.

  That day Vukich acquired two letters that Julie had written to a teacher, Kristi Webster, five or six weeks before. Webster had noticed a profound change in Julie’s behavior in the fall of 1988. The eager, hardworking student Webster had known the previous semester had become morose and distracted, dragging through her classes with a haggard and blank face. Along with a friend, Julie had gotten in trouble for making long-distance calls from a school telephone. Julie had never broken a rule before, and so Webster asked her to write a note explaining why she was misbehaving. Julie wrote:

  My feelings about this whole ordeal are totally weird. Sometimes I feel good and sometime bad and then there are the day I feel totally confused and just wish I could move to a different state and start life all over w/ new friend and no one would have to know about my past. And I have time mostly at night when I’m so scared. I don’t sleep I just wait in my room for my dad. I hate it. I will never enjoy sex. It hurt so bad and it makes me feel very dirty.

  Being a Christian I suppose to forgive him for what he did and still does to me, but Its very hard he also says thing to me like “if your a good girl God will take care of you.” And if you tell you’ll pay for it I promise you.

  The significant statement in this part of the letter was that the abuse was still occurring at the time it was written. What followed, however, was even more explosive and changed the course of the investigation entirely. For Julie’s memory now implicated people other than family members:

  I can remember when I was 4 yr old he would have poker game at our house and alot of men would come over and play poker w/ my dad, and they would all get drunk and one or two at a time would come in to my room and have sex with me they would be in and out all nigh
t laughing and cursing. I was so scared I didn’t know what to say or who to talk to. The wierd thing was Ericka & I shared a room and they never touch her because she would say something and also at night most the time she slept on the top bed. And I think my dad & all his friend were afriad the bed might break. And my dad was always said to them Stay away from her (Ericka). She is under special care of her doctor and he will find out.

  A sex ring of pedophiles would in itself be earth-shaking news in Thurston County, but Vukich realized that the letter was even more incriminating than that. He knew about the poker games—Ericka had mentioned them in her confrontation with her mother—but he also knew that most of the poker players were colleagues of Ingram’s at the sheriff’s office. Tom Lynch, the chief of detectives, had been a regular at the games; so had Undersheriff McClanahan; even Vukich had sat in occasionally. The game had seemed to him completely innocent. Had it all been a charade, a front for a conspiracy of sex criminals operating out of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office?

  Julie’s second letter to Kristi Webster revealed the degree of her despair:

  I am so freaked out I can’t even eat I have so much going through my head. It’s very hard to understand. I’m really scared about this whole situation I don’t know if I doing what is right I feel like this is all my fault that I cause this to happen I’m the problem and I wonder what going to happen to my family will my dad be lock up and my mom left behind w/ Mark or will this just blow over and no one will understand where I’m coming from. I’m at the edge of my rope.

  Despite the fact that much of the department and key members of the investigative team had been implicated in the case, Vukich and Schoening renewed their interrogation of Paul Ingram that afternoon. The psychologist Richard Peterson joined them and quickly took control of the interview. He must have felt like a prophet; even before the interview officially began, Ingram confided that he was beginning to remember being abused by his uncle, as Peterson had suggested only that morning.

  First, however, Ingram wanted to clear up the confusion he felt about being interrogated by his fellow officers. He had been crying and praying in his cell, and he expressed his anxiety that Schoening and Vukich doubted his sincerity. “I really want you to—to believe that I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Why is that important to you?” Peterson asked.

  “ ’Cuz I don’t think Brian believes me,” said Ingram.

  “Their job is not to believe you,” Peterson said bluntly. “It’s to try and get as much information as possible.”

  “And I’m trying to—to prove that I am being cooperative,” Ingram stuttered. “There’s—I—I’m—I truly am.”

  Schoening responded in the same personal, emotional vein. “I guess what my feeling is … even this morning we gained some additional information, from Julie, okay, and I guess what I’m saying is … she has a good reason to suppress this crime—more than you do, Paul. I mean, this has really happened to her.”

  What troubled Joe Vukich is that Ingram was a cop, “and as cops we have a very factual, very punctual, very data-minded frame of reference, if you will.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ingram agreed.

  “And that’s what makes it hard for us at least to comprehend that you can’t recall this, because I’ll bet you could go back and take a citation you wrote ten years ago … you’d pretty much remember what happened that day.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. In a lot of cases I could do that.”

  “That’s what confuses me about this,” Vukich continued. “What happened with Julie happened just last month. It’s—it’s very real, it’s very recent. Granted, it’s very hard to talk about.”

  “I can’t see it,” Ingram protested. “I can’t visualize it in my own mind.”

  “Your wife called this morning and tells me that Chad is really, really upset and shook about all this and he wants to talk to me as soon as he can,” said Schoening. “What all he’ll have to say I don’t know, but it sounds to me like we’re probably talkin’ about all four of your kids, maybe all five of ’em. Your wife is sittin’ there telling me how she can stand by ya and still love ya. I don’t know why she should.… You’re just tryin’ to keep from tellin’ any more than you have to tell.… It’s kinda like a nonadmission admission.”

  Peterson began asking Ingram to describe his sex life with Sandy, which Ingram did with some enthusiasm.

  “Did you ever use alcohol as part of your lovemaking?” Peterson asked.

  “No, I—it would seem to me that alcohol would sting,” Ingram said, surprised.

  “It was pointed out that you used to drink quite a bit,” Peterson said, making himself clear. “Someone said you used to have quite an appetite for beer.”

  “Oh,” said Ingram, “what I would do … we got an old refrigerator and put a keg of beer [in it] and we used to have poker parties at the house and I did like to come home after I’d been workin’ swing shift and sit down and have one, uh, maybe two beers.”

  Now that he had mentioned the poker parties, the questioning became more focused. “Would you drink more then?” asked Schoening.

  “I can’t say I never got intoxicated,” said Ingram. “But I can remember, you know, some of the guys getting pretty wasted, and over a period of four or five hours I might have four beers.”

  “Where was your wife during the poker parties?” asked Peterson.

  “As I recall, she would’ve gone to bed, ’cuz we’d stay up and play pretty late.”

  “So the poker buddies that you played with would be who?” asked Peterson. “Friends from the department, or—”

  “Yeah, most of ’em were friends from the department, or friends of theirs,” Ingram agreed. “We’d get, I don’t know, five or eight guys together.” He then named several men, most of whom were police officers. There were two names he failed to mention, a fact that would soon become significant.

  “One night I won over a hundred dollars, and my wife said, ‘Hey, that’s wrong,’ and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll play next weekend and lose it all,’ ” Ingram related. “The next weekend we played and I couldn’t lose for tryin’. It was unreal. I won about a hundred twenty-five dollars, and we just quit.”

  “Were the kids aware of the poker parties?” asked Peterson.

  “Oh, yeah, ’cuz we played underneath their bedrooms.”

  “Anybody go up to see the kids?” asked Vukich.

  “I just can’t think of anything where anybody—”

  “The reason I ask, Paul, is because Julie told me about a time or two where when there was a poker party she was molested.”

  “What we’re talking about, Paul, is she was molested by somebody other than you,” Schoening clarified in his rumbling voice. “She even remembers being—somebody tying her up on the bed and two people, at least, taking turns with her while somebody else watched, probably you.”

  Ingram gasped in surprise. “I just don’t see anything,” he said when Schoening pressed him. “Let me think about this for a minute. Let me see if I can get in there. Assuming it happened, she would’ve had to have had a bed, bedroom by herself … uh …”

  The pauses in Ingram’s statement sometimes lasted ten full minutes, intensifying the frustration on the part of the questioners. He would grab hold of his hair and lean forward, dead still, until his limbs went to sleep, while the investigators stood around, fuming with impatience. Schoening prodded Ingram by saying that even as they talked Julie was in fear for her life. “That person is still out on the street. That person is some friend of yours that worked or works for this department.”

  Schoening’s remarks would have serious consequences, so it’s important to note the assumptions buried in them. Julie’s fears, insofar as she had expressed them, were about whether she was doing the right thing in coming forward with her story, and whether she would break up her family as a result. The only person she had seemed to be afraid of was her father. There was nothing in the record at this point that
reflected her terror of being stalked by a potential killer. The extrapolations about her fear of someone else were only guesswork on Schoening’s part. The terms of the investigation had been redefined, however.

  “We need to protect her, Paul,” warned Vukich.

  “She’s terrified, Paul,” Schoening added.

  “I—I hear what you’re sayin’, but just be quiet and let me think,” Ingram pleaded.

  “Apparently, it’s somebody that’s still close to you, Paul,” said Schoening, once again departing from the record. Was he guiding Ingram toward some private judgment of his own?

  “Jim Rabie played poker with us. Jim and I have been fairly close,” Ingram said helpfully. James L. Rabie, the man who had done the electrical work on the Ingrams’ house as a favor, once worked sex crimes. As a matter of fact, he had been the one who had investigated Ericka’s prior claim of attempted rape and had decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. At that time, he held the job that Schoening had now, that of senior investigator. Rabie and Schoening had a long-standing and well-known dislike of each other. Ingram had not mentioned his name in his original list of poker players.

  “Is Jim the person she’s talking about?” Vukich asked.

  “Just—just don’t put words in my mouth,” Ingram responded. “Jim has some—I guess I’d say—what I consider to be unnatural sexual attractions.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “We went over to Yakima one time for something, and Jim bought some magazines, said to help him in his job when he was doing sex crimes. And he looked at ’em. I didn’t. I just don’t do that kind of thing.… Geez, I’d hate to think he’d had anything to do with my kids.”