Thurston county undersheriff Neil McClanahan, mustached and trim, is the intense young man who headed up the investigation. He has thirty-two three-inch binders, which are filled with testimony, transcripts from interrogations, police reports, and other documentation on the Ingram case.

Asked about satanic crime, he rolls out a chart he has made that covers a good part of his office wall. The chart has hundreds of bubbles with interconnecting lines. Each of the bubbles contains a word or phrase that describes the activities of various satanic cults. They are words like "murder," "threats," "defecation on victims," "child pornography," and "ritual sacrifice."

"This is link analysis," McClanahan says of the chart. "If, for the last 150 years, law enforcement has been playing baseball, this stuff is tri-level chess. And a baseball and a catcher's mitt don't work when you're playing tri-level chess."

McClanahan believes satanic criminals are so sinister and clever that the normal legal procedures and safeguards do not apply. Scientific police work does not apply because the criminals never leave evidence. The normal measures of witness credibility must be abandoned, because most of the victims as well as the criminals have been brainwashed and programmed with misinformation.

Mother Jones Magazine Jul-Aug 1991