List of satanic ritual abuse allegations

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Allegations of satanic ritual abuse have been reported throughout the world, with some proceeding to prosecution and imprisonment. Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have had several incidents of alleged SRA which received national and international news coverage. Other countries have also had isolated events in which abuse or murder took place with satanic ritual elements, including Argentina and Brazil.

Contents 1 Australia 1.1 Perth, Western Australia 1.2 Melbourne, Victoria 1.3 Mornington Peninsula, Victoria 1.4 Central Coast, New South Wales 2 Belgium 3 Brazil 4 Ireland 5 Italy 6 The Netherlands 7 South Africa 7.1 Van Rooyen case 8 United Kingdom 8.1 Rochdale 8.2 Orkney 8.3 Broxtowe 8.4 Lewis 9 United States 9.1 Jordan, Minnesota 9.2 Hosanna Church, New Orleans 10 See also 11 References

[edit] Australia

[edit] Perth, Western Australia

In 1991, police in Perth linked Scott Gozenton, a self-professed Satanist, with organized child sexual abuse. His lawyer claimed 13 satanic covens existed in the area, holding bizarre orgies involving children, and that Gozenton had been followed and threatened by "coven" members throughout the court proceedings.^[1]

[edit] Melbourne, Victoria

In 1998, Robin Angus Fletcher was jailed for eight years after pleading guilty to the sexual and ritual abuse of two children. Fletcher had previous convictions for false imprisonment, indecent assault, managing a brothel and living off earnings of prostitution.^[2] Along with his wife, he was found to have used hypnosis and ritualistic abuse to sexually abuse and prostitute two children in the mid-1990s. Whilst in jail, he attempted to have the two children murdered in order to prevent them from testifying against him.^[3]

In 2001, the Melbourne diocese of the Catholic Church acknowledged as "substantially true" allegations that a Melbourne priest took part in Satanic ritual abuse in which a number of deaths occurred in the 1960s, and paid compensation to a surviving victim.^[4]

[edit] Mornington Peninsula, Victoria

In the late 1980s, a number of children at a daycare centre in the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, were referred to the Monash Sexual Assault Centre after disclosing experiences of physical and sexual abuse. The alleged perpetrators were the parents of a child attending their kindergarten. Six months later, another group of children from the same daycare centre were referred to the Centre, following contact from a young mother distressed by her child's allegations that she had taken from the day care centre and sexually abused.^[5]

Over time, these children disclosed organised and ritualistic sexual abuse to the workers, their parents and the police.^[6] Their disclosures included instances in which they were taken in a car from the creche to a nearby house, undressed by adults and sexually assaulted, video-taped and filmed while naked, and urinated and defecated upon by adults. The children disclosed that some of the abusers wore police uniforms, masks, robes and costumes.^[7] Whilst in treatment at the Sexual Assault Service, the children also disclosed a range of ritualistic sexual offences against them, committed in local churches and houses..^[8]

In 1992, a government inquiry ordered that the daycare centre be shut on the basis that there was significant evidence that the owner of the centre had either participated in the abuse or facilitated it.^[9] This include forensic evidence that some of the children had been sexually penetrated, and one child had a broken cheekbone where, she stated, she had been punched by a perpetrator for failing to comply with his demands.^[10] The police never pressed charges against the couple, who later fled to Queensland and, in a serious breach of privacy laws, published the names and addresses of all the complainant children online.^[11]

In 2002, Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon refers complaints about the mishandling of the case by police to the Victorian Ombudsman. An officer from the Ethical Standards Department was stood down a year later from the Ombudsman's investigation for "incompetence" after failing to pass on information from two key witnesses, and claiming that he never spoke to them when phone records proved that he had. One of the witnesses referred to a tape of child pornography showing men in police uniforms sexually assaulting children from the daycare centre, however, this lead was never followed up by the police. Another witness identified the house in which the children had been assaulted as being owned by a police officer.^[12]

The principal of a private college on the Mornington Peninsula repeatedly told the Department of Human Services that a 12-year-old boy disclosed ongoing sexual abuse by an organised group of men wearing police uniforms. According to the principal, all records of the child's complaint vanished. A Victoria Police spokesman said he was not aware that files had disappeared. The police declined to press charges, saying the boy had been "too well groomed" by the abusers and probably would not testify in court.^[13]

In 2004, the Office of Police Integrity found that the police investigation into the abuse of the children at the preschool had been inadequate and ordered a re-opening of the investigation.^[14]

[edit] Central Coast, New South Wales

In 1999, two journalists from the Sun-Herald claimed to have seen evidence of the ritual abuse of children. They interviewed six mothers whose children had disclosed experiences of SRA and organised abuse in New South Wales. The children's disclosures were corroborating, although they had never met one another, and they had been able to draw representations of "satanic" ritual sites which were similar to ritual sites uncovered by police on the central coast of New South Wales. One mother stated that her sons remembered being drugged and hypnotised. "He said they dressed in black robes and had eye and mouth pieces cut out," she said. "I know they're pretty dangerous people. I have had warnings outside the house telling me to stop investigations. We're fearful for our lives. The boys never want me out of their sight.".^[15]

[edit] Belgium

Main article: Marc Dutroux

During the investigation of the very high profile Marc Dutroux case, a number of women approached police claiming to be adult survivors of a network of sexual offenders.^[16] The police checked Regina Louf's stories. They corroborated details of her story. Key elements of her story were verified and the police found at least one murder that she stated she saw matched an unsolved murder.

There appears to be a steel veil drawn over the facts at the highest level and no one is prepared to expose those involved in this blatant cover-up. ^[17]

In relation to SRA, Regina Louf (Witness X1) stated in interview, "When they received new victims into their network, it was extremely important that they shouldn't speak to anyone about what had happened to them. That's why they organised ‘ceremonies'. They took the victim to a heavily guarded house and convinced her that it was ‘her' party. There would then be a great performance with masks, candles, inverted crosses, swords and animals. Rabbits were disemboweled, the blood was poured on naked girls, and some men and women worshipped the devil ... The only aim of these rituals was to totally disorient the victims. They plagued these kids with a load of nonsense - ‘Now you are the wife of Satan' – and also gave them coke, LSD or heroin. I can assure you that after that you feel completely outside the real world. That was the aim – that the victim herself should begin to doubt the fact that all this had really happened. The result was that the victims didn't dare speak to anyone."^[18]

[edit] Brazil

In the early 1990s, Superior Universal Alignment, an Argentinian-based international cult, was implicated in the ritualistic murders of several children. One of the leaders of the group, Osvaldo Marcineiro, confessed to murdering a number of young children in Satanic rituals, in which the children were tortured, murdered and their body parts cannibalised. A number of prominent citizens were arrested in relation to the murders, and it later emerged that they had paid the cult to conduct the murderous ceremonies. A search on cult member's houses turned up cult registers, guns, hooded cloaks, 100 videotapes of cult ceremonies and satanist publications, including a 200-page book by cult leader Valentina de Andrade called God, the Great Farce. Brazilian authorities suggested that the cult was connected to Satanic groups internationally. ^[19]

In 2003, five members of the Superior Universal Alignment cult in the Amazonian town of Altamira were convicted for the ritualistic murders of three children and the castration of two others. The victims were aged between 8 and 13 years, and they were kidnapped, tortured or killed between 1989 and 1993. Their genitals were removed and used in Satanic rituals by 75-year old village clairvoyant, Valentina de Andrade, the leader of the Superior Universal Alignment cult ^[20]. De Andrade had previously been sought by police in Argentina and Uruguay prior to her arrest in Brazil on suspicion of involvement in other satanic ritual killings^[21].

Following the castration of victims, two doctors involved in the sect removed the victim's other organs for sale on the international black market ^[22]. Other people sentenced in relation to the murders included a former police officer, a businessman and the son of an influential landowner. The charges related to the murders of three young children and the attempted murder of another, however, victim's families say that there were at least nineteen other murdered children. The cult is based in Argentina and has branches in Holland ^[23].

[edit] Ireland

In 2007, a jury at Dublin Country Coroner's court unanimously ruled that the infant found stabbed to death over three decades ago belonged to Cynthia Owen.^[24] The Minister of Justice had previously reject a request by Cynthia Owen to have the body of the child exhumed, a decision Ms. Owen did not contest.^[25] The inquest was prohibited from assigning blame due to the Coroners Act of 1962 and therefore returned an open verdict.^[26] Also, the jury was instructed that the standard of proof was not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" benchmark of criminal trials, but rather the lessor standard of determining whether Owen's claims were true based "on the balance of probabilities".^[26] Ms. Owen made claims about a stillborn second child buried in the family garden, but police found no human remains after digging up the plot.^[27][28] Owen's parents, as well as her older siblings, deny her allegations of abuse.^[29]

During the trial, Owen provide her account of incest, organised abuse, and satanic ritual abuse orchestrated by her parents involving at least nine other men and her account was supported by her psychologist.^[30] She claimed that her brother and sister Michael and Therese were also abused, a charge that was denied by her older brother and father. Michael disappeared in 2002 and Therese committed suicide shortly after the discovery of his body in 2005; Therese's detailed 37-paged suicide note corroborated Cynthia's account.^[29] A friend of Therese's testified at the trial, stating that Therese had spoken to him at length about her sexual abuse in childhood.^[31]

Following the findings of the Coroner's Court, Owen has raised questions regarding the disposal of her daughter's body and the failure of the police to investigate the murder. In particular, she has highlighted the fact that no blood or tissue samples were kept, that the bag and sanitary towels found alongside the murdered child have gone missing, that the records of the first inquest into the murder have gone missing, and that her daughter was buried in a mass grave alongside other infants.^[29] Owen claimed that the police knew about the murder and did nothing.^[32] She also stated that she felt robbed of justice by her mother's natural and peaceful death.^[32]

Owen's father and three of her sisters won the right to appeal the findings of the inquest from the High Court. The family claimed that the coroner was biased toward Owen, shielded her when giving evidence and was selective in the evidence presented to the jury.^[33] According to recent reports, the case of the murdered child remains the subject of an ongoing investigation by the garda. ^[34]

[edit] Italy

In 1998, six adults in Emilia-Romagna were arrested with allegations of prostituting their children and the production of child pornography. The children were also reported to be involved in satanic rituals.^[35] In 2002, four people were arrested for "satanism and paedophilia" in Pescara. Police believed that the group may have abused dozens of children in rituals involving bodies stolen from ceremonies.^[36] In April of 2007, six people were arrested for sexually abusing fifteen children in Rignano Flaminio. The suspects were accused of filming the children engaged in sexual acts with 'satanic' overtones.^[37]

[edit] The Netherlands

In 1989, a group of parents reported suspected abuse in a school in the town of Oude Pekela, The Netherlands, with some individuals reporting Satanic abuse. Authorities investigated and found no proof of abuse^[38] and the original allegations and their analysis by researchers have been disputed by scholars.^[39] Unrelated allegations in 1991 resulted in a workgroup to study the existence of SRA in the Netherlands,^[40] which concluded it was unlikely SRA occurred in the manner described and that the stories were not wholly true. The report suggested the allegations served as a defence mechanism against other types of psychological trauma, produced in part by suggestive questioning by 'believing' therapists.^[40]

[edit] South Africa

[edit] Van Rooyen case

In 1990, Gert van Rooyen and his accomplice were accused of murdering several young girls, ultimately committing suicide while running from the police.^[41] One of the accused's stepson was later himself accused of murdering a Zimbabwean girl in 1991; the same son claimed his father's victims were involved in international child pornography rings, slavery and Satanism ritual, claims which were partly corroborated with further investigation.^[42][43] The case was so similar to crimes committed by Marc Dutroux that multiple agencies investigated a possible international smuggling ring in prostituted children and body parts.^[44]

[edit] United Kingdom

There have been a number of cases in the United Kingdom in which SRA has been alleged. Some of these cases have garnered significant media attention, and they are listed below.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children document allegations of ritual abuse in 1990, with the publication of survey findings that, of 66 child protection teams in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 14 teams had received reports of ritual abuse from children and seven of them were working directly with children who had been ritually abused, sometimes in groups of 20.^[45]

[edit] Rochdale

In 1990 there was a case in Rochdale which around twenty children were removed from their homes by social services who alleged the existence of SRA after discovering 'satanic indicators'. No evidence was found of satanic apparatus' and charges were dismissed when a court ruled the allegations were untrue. The children who were removed from their homes sued the city council in 2006 for compensation and an apology.^[46]

[edit] Orkney

In 1990-1991 nine children suspected of being sexually abused by their families and an alleged child abuse ring were removed by social services in Orkney. The abuse was also alleged to involve "ritualistic elements".^[47] The parents approached the media and made the case national and international news. In April 1991, a sheriff ruled that the evidence was seriously flawed and the children were returned home.^[47] In June, social services successfully appealed the sheriff's ruling, but the case was not pursued to the criminal courts.^{[citation needed]}

In 1992, the case was subject to an official inquiry. The report found that the conduct of the workers during the removal was proper.^[48] However, a 1994 government report based on three years of research found that there was no foundation to the many claims of Satanic abuse.^[47]

[edit] Broxtowe

In Nottingham, a Broxtowe family was charged with multigenerational child sexual abuse and neglect. A 600-page report on the incident concluded that there was no evidence of the claims made by children or corroborating adults. Though the children may have been 'sadistically terrorized', allegations of organized satanic abuse were found to be baseless and the indicators used by the Social Services department were without validity.^[49]

[edit] Lewis

In 2003 allegations by three children in Lewis, Scotland resulted in the arrest of eight people for sexual abuse occurring between 1990 and 2000. A 2005 investigation by the Social Work Inspection Agency found extensive evidence of sexual, physical and emotional abuse and neglect.^[50] Police investigation resulted in allegations of an island-wide "Satanic paedophile ring",^[50][51] though charges were dropped nine months later following an inconclusive investigation.^[51][50]

A key witness who had implicated her family in the abuse and whose evidence was "vital" to the case of satanic abuse recanted her testimony in 2006^[51][52] and the media raised questions about the nature of the police interviewing techniques.^[51][52] with a police spokesperson replying that the witness was questioned appropriately and that allegations were made by numerous witnesses.^[52]

[edit] United States

Main article: Kern County child abuse cases

Main article: McMartin preschool trial

Main article: West Memphis 3

Main article: Little Rascals Day Care Center

In the United States, major allegations of Satanic ritual abuse occurred in the Kern County child abuse cases, McMartin preschool trial and the West Memphis 3, which garnered world-wide media coverage.

[edit] Jordan, Minnesota

The first such case occurred in Jordan, Minnesota, in 1983, where several children made allegations against an unrelated man and their parents. The man confessed and then identified a number of the children’s parents as perpetrators. Ultimately twenty four adults were charged with child abuse though only three went to trial with two acquittals and one conviction.^[53] Despite strong medical findings of sexual assault, all other charges were dropped after the young child witnesses decompensated under the duress of the criminal trial. ^[54]

During the investigation, the children made allegations regarding the manufacturing of child pornography, ritualistic animal sacrifice, coprophagia, urophagia and infanticide, at which point the Federal Bureau of Investigation was alerted.^[55] No criminal charges resulted from the FBI investigation, and in his review of the case, the Attorney General noted that the initial investigation by the local police and county attorney was so poor that it had destroyed the opportunity to fully investigate the children’s allegations.^[56] A special commission later reviewed the conduct of the county attorney in dismissing charges against the remaining defendants, noting that it was likely that other charges would have been successfully prosecuted. ^[57] In response, the county attorney argued that she lacked the personnel to investigate the children’s disclosures of capital crimes, including murder, whilst also managing multiple sexual abuse cases. ^[58]

Supreme Court Justice Scalia referred to the Minnesota case in his summation on a later case, and stated, "[t]here is no doubt that some sexual abuse took place in Jordan; but there is no reason to believe it was as widespread as charged," and cited the repeated, well-intentioned but coercive techniques used by the investigators as damaging to the investigation.^[53] The bizarre allegations of the children, the ambiguities of the investigation and the unsuccessful prosecutions were widely covered by the media. A number of accused parents confessed to sexually abusing their children, received immunity, and underwent treatment for sexual abuse, whilst parental rights for six other children in the case were terminated.^[59]

[edit] Hosanna Church, New Orleans

In 2007, a state district court jury in Amite voted unanimously Monday to convict Austin "Trey" Bernard III in the rape of his 2-year-old daughter, and 11 of the 12 jurors found him guilty in the rape of a 12-year-old boy. Ten votes were needed to convict. Bernard had pled not guilty, however, he had previously confessed three times, and written about the ritualistic sexual abuse of the children in a detailed 230-page diary supplied to the jury. There are currently six remaining defendants awaiting trial in relation to the case, and they have been accused of organised and ritualistic abuse of three children at Hosanna Church.^[60]

The activities at the church became known when one of the defendants walked in to the local sheriff's office, and described to investigators how he and other church members had molested children, taught them to have sex with each other, as well as with a dog, and engaged in SRA. He told the detectives that he drank cat blood and poured it on the bodies of his young victims.^[61]

At Bernard's trial, Federal prosecutor Lisa Marie Freitas testified to the fact that Bernard had confessed to the sexual abuse of the complainant children in Satanic rituals. "According to Bernard, the rituals took place in what was called “the room,” which was the church's youth room ... The rituals had a Satanic theme, including a Pentagram, the use of animals and animal parts such as chicken feet and the use of animal blood ... The youth room was pitch black when the lights were out, [Freitas] said, but the room was equipped with a black light. When Bernard turned it on, the light revealed writings on the walls from ceiling to floor. “Every inch, from top to bottom, was writing,” Freitas said. The writing consisted of songs, lyrics and Biblical verses. Some of the words were inverted or changed, she said. Using a special chemical, a search team found signs of body fluids all over the carpet, she said."^[62]

[edit] See also

• File 18
• Miscarriage of justice
• Pace memorandum

[edit] References