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Uncover Season 6 – ‘The Many Martensvilles’

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[Crickets chirping and footsteps]

VOICE 1: On March 20^th…

VOICE 2: Run!

[Heavy breathing and running]

VOICE 1: ..only one movie experience this year will make you afraid to breathe.

VOICE 3: You won’t survive.

VOICE 2: We have to try.

VOICE 1: A Quiet Place: Part II. In theatres March 20^th. Tickets on sale now.

[Music]

ANNOUNCER: This is a CBC original podcast.

[Music]

LISA: I have so many things to ask. I'm going to ask you for, like, sort of shorter answers.

KEN: Yes I know that. That's my biggest problem. I can't give-- the problem I have is I can't give short, snappy sound bites to answer extremely complex questions.

LISA: Ken Lanning spent more than years as a special agent with the FBI. And for the bulk of that time, his focus was the sexual victimization of children, trying to understand it, so he could help stop it.

KEN: We like black and white kind of problems so we tend to want to oversimplify everything. The sexual victimization of children is an extremely complex and diverse problem.

LISA: In the early 80s, as Ken was first trying to get his head around those complexities, the United States was facing this new, especially disturbing set of crimes against children Satanic Ritual Abuse.

KEN: The first one or two phone calls that I got about this, I said, “Oh, my God, this is terrible, this is horrible”. And my early efforts were trying to help police to find the corroborative evidence. And as I told this first detective who I talked to, I said, “Listen, I've heard of everything you're describing. I've just never heard it all in one case, all in one big package all put together this way.” I had been aware of offenders who murdered people, mutilated their bodies, ate body parts, drank blood, all that kind of stuff I knew had happened. I just never heard it in quite this form. And in quite this way.

LISA: After those first one or two calls, there were dozens more. Call after call, detectives from all over the country, reaching out to Ken for help on cases with startling similarities.

KEN: As I was trying to figure out what was happening, I began to think well, if some of this isn't happening, why are these victims alleging it? If it isn't happening, where did they get the details from? If it isn't happening, why is there a similarity to this story? And if it isn't happening, why are there so many intelligent well-educated professionals who believe that it is happening? Those are all valid important questions that I didn't immediately know the answer to, so I tended to think if this is what the child is saying or this is what an adult survivor is describing in hindsight, then there's a good possibility that this may have happened.

LISA: Ken continues to investigate. But the evidence he expected to find never turns up. And Ken's view evolves.

KEN: It wasn't the lack of corroborative evidence that concerned me. It was the lack of corroborative evidence when there should have been corroborative evidence. That's the important thing. You can't murder twenty people in a house and not leave any evidence behind. I'll give you seven days to clean it up and you're not going to clean it all up. There's gonna be trace evidence left behind.

LISA: Ken may reject simple answers, but he did come to some clear conclusions summarized in a report called ‘The Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse.’ There are quotation marks around the word ritual. In his report, Ken writes, "We now have hundreds of victims alleging that thousands of offenders are abusing and even murdering tens of thousands of people as part of organized Satanic cults. And there is little or no corroborative evidence. Now it is up to mental health professionals, not law enforcement, to explain why victims are alleging things that don't seem to have happened."

Ken's guide is published in January of 1992, six months before nine people are arrested and charged with nearly 180 offences against children in the tiny prairie town of Martensville.

[Music]

ANCHOR 1: Ron and Linda Sterling were found not guilty of all the charges against them. But their son, Travis Sterling, was convicted on eight counts.

CLAUDIA: The evidence was, you know, the same children giving similar evidence against all three individuals only one person is convicted. That's very confusing.

LINDA: I just hope that the parents and the jury can sleep well knowing they’ve sent an innocent person to jail.

RON: Everybody says these kids have had a rough time these past two years. We're not guilty of any charges, you can imagine what we've gone through.

MARJALEENA: The children told nothing.

OVERLAPPING VOICES: It was really frightening.

The fact that there was nothing turning up…

And you know that you’re dealing with an innocent man.

LISA: I'm Lisa Bryn Rundle. And this is Uncover - Satanic Panic. Episode Five, The Many Martensvilles.

[Music]

LISA: In the early days of 1994, the people of Martensville begin to move forward after the Sterling trial. But the mixed verdicts have left the community unsure about what to believe. Travis Sterling and the young offender have been found guilty. The others who've been tried have not. So what did it all mean? The community is divided.

MAN 1: I don't think they did it. I think all three of them are not guilty.

MAN 2: I think they're all guilty. Every one of them.

LISA: So many questions still hang in the air, most pressingly…

REPORTER 1: What does this mean for the upcoming trials in the case?

LISA: The four remaining accused, the three from the Martensville Police Service and one RCMP officer, are still headed to trial.

REPORTER 1: The judge was quite pointed in his charge to the jury that in many cases there weren't-- there wasn't very much evidence connecting these people to…

LISA: Outside the courthouse, reporters question prosecutor Leslie Sullivan.

REPORTER 2: Are you prosecuting the next case?

LESLIE: Yes.

LISA: But there isn't a next case.

ANCHOR 2: Saskatchewan justice has announced that a stay of proceedings has been filed with respect to the remaining four adults charged in the Martensville case.

LISA: The trials come to an abrupt end. The charges are stayed against all four of the remaining accused essentially, put on hold. But they won't be pursued any further. Maybe, just maybe, the dark cloud of suspicion they've each been living under for the better part of two years will finally lift. But the fifteen convictions against Travis Sterling and the young offender remain. Their appeals are yet to come. And prosecutors plan to mount a vigorous defence.

[Music]

[Phone ringing]

HEATHER: Hello.

LISA: Oh, hi, is this Heather?

HEATHER: It is.

LISA: I've reached lawyer Heather Leonoff. She represented Travis during his appeal.

So what was your first inkling that there was maybe something a bit different about this case than others?

HEATHER: So when you're an appellate counsel you come to the case very much like the jury does. In other words, you come with not a lot of knowledge and the case gets laid out to you in the same way it gets laid out to the jury. I started to read it and I'm reading and I'm reading and I'm reading, and I remember saying, this is a work of fiction and not only is it a work of fiction, it's a very bad work of fiction. This was reading Hansel and Gretel. The children being put into cages in the witch's cottage in the in the woods. And as I'm reading it and getting farther into it I said, no, I'm wrong. This isn't a work of fiction. This is a work of history. I'm reading the Salem Witch Trials. I am reading, in the 20th century, the 17th century Salem Witch Trials. The essence of my case to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal was, this is all made up. This is mass hysteria.

LISA: This hysteria had been sweeping North America and beyond for a decade. And to begin to understand why you need to understand the 80s.

[Music and overlapping sound bites]

LISA: Jeans are high waisted and acid washed. Shoulder pads are BIG. So is hair. And Ronald Reagan is in the White House.

RONALD REAGAN: There is sin and evil in the world

LISA: As Richard Beck points out in his book “We Believe the Children”, the 80s were a time of epidemics both real…

REPORTER 3: It's a disease that was first detected in the gay community that has now spread beyond that.

LISA: …and imagined

REPORTER 4: Despite all the warnings, a growing number of babies are being born already addicted to cocaine.

LISA: The 80s come on the heels of the huge social upheaval of the 60s and 70s. Think sexual revolution, civil rights, radical feminism, gay liberation, assassinations. Society is changing at its most basic unit, the family.

REPORTER 5: Instead of spending the day at home doing housework and caring for the kids, moms are in the workplace.

LISA: Middleclass women are heading out of the home and into the workplace like never before.

REPORTER 6: Of course daycare centers have been around for a long time, but they've really taken off the last fifteen years or so and there's been a huge growth in the number of two income couples.

LISA: By the early 80s, a large percentage of women who worked outside the home had very young children. These spasms of change are exciting for some…

GLORIA STEINEM: I no longer accept society's judgement that my group is second class.

LISA: But disorienting and destabilizing for others.

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY: The American dream is not hiring strangers to take care of your children.

LISA: And all that leads to a whole lot of fear centred directly on children. What would it mean that mothers wouldn't be devoting themselves full time to hearth and home? Or that young, vulnerable children would now spend so much time in the care of strangers?

CHILD: So remember, if a grown-up touches you wrong and it hurts or makes you feel funny, yell and tell. You have the right.

WOMAN 1: Get hold of yourself, before you take hold of your child.

WOMAN 2: It’s 10:00pm, do you know where your children are?

LISA: At the same time, a wave of conservatism focused on preserving the traditional family sweeps in as an urgent corrective.

BILLY GRAHAM: There is a devil and there are demons. Now, they may be more sophisticated in America than they are in some other parts of the world, but they're demons nevertheless.

LISA: And Satan is having a moment.

[Music]

VOICE 1: This program deals with devil worship and Satanic beliefs.

ANTON LAVEY: We're in the very throes of a new Satanic age.

PASTOR: I want you to listen to the backward message. I believe it says “It's my sweet Satan”

[“Stairway to Heaven” plays backwards]

GERALDO RIVERA: Whether Satan exists is a matter of belief, but we're certain that Satanism exists. To some it's a religion, to others, it's the practice of evil in the devil's name. It exists and it's flourishing.

LISA: That's Geraldo Rivera on his primetime special “Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground.” It aired in 1998, and reached a record number of viewers.

GERALDO: What were they doing to you?

KID: Molesting me.

GERALDO: What does that mean. What does molesting mean?

KID: Touching us in places we don't want.

LISA: And it wasn't just Geraldo. It was 60 Minutes. It was 20/20.

EXPERT: When you get into one of these groups there's only a couple of ways you can get out. One is death. The other is mental institutions. Or third, you can't get out.

BARBARA WALTERS: That's terrifying, and that's no choice.

LISA: It was so easy to believe that children were under attack, in Oak Hill, Texas. Malden, Massachusetts. Hamilton, Ontario. And Martensville, Saskatchewan. In part, because they WERE under attack. Just not by an underground network of Satanic cults. The real danger was much more common than anyone cared to admit. And much closer to home.

[Music]

LISA: Around this time, there was something else something even more insidious that was undermining the imagined perfection of the traditional family and striking fear into the hearts of parents.

KEN: They discovered that many children were being abused and believe it or not, one of the big breakthroughs in that regard was the x-ray.

LISA: Former FBI agent Ken Lanning.

KEN: When they discovered that many children when they x-rayed them had healed broken bones and so on, they discovered that many of these children had been physically abused.

LISA: It's hard to imagine now but the modern concept of child abuse didn't exist before the early 1960s. Radiologists initially suspected they might be dealing with a new childhood disease of some kind. But finally, after a decade of trying to find any other explanation, they began to accept the most obvious, if least palatable, answer. Parents were hurting their OWN children. This disturbing reality was soon understood to be its own epidemic. And children's vulnerability to violence inflicted by a trusted adult moved front and centre in the public mind.

KEN: And that led to then more realization of sexual abuse. Now, sexual abuse has been something that has been talked about for a long, long time, for centuries, and it was somewhat controversial, but a lot of it focused on the fact that people felt that you couldn't rely on or believe children. That they had fantasies and they may not be describing what happened.

And most of my early training, the focus on was strangers who would lure kids in the park or in a back alley and so on and that kind of thing. Now it came to the realization that most of these children were being abused by family members.

LISA: According to the U.S. Department of Justice, around this time, 93 per cent of sexual abuse against children and youth was perpetrated by a family member or acquaintance, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. In a relatively short period of time, we went from almost no acknowledgement or awareness about child abuse, physical, psychological or sexual, to not only knowing it happened, but knowing it was being perpetrated by people in positions of trust.

KEN: And so there was an increased focus on believing children and so on. The big problem back then was that you couldn't convict somebody on the uncorroborated testimony of a victim.

LISA: But soon, the pendulum swung the other way.

KEN: I started to go to these big national and large child abuse conferences. It was almost like they were keeping a vote about how many states were still requiring corroboration. And we all had to work towards eliminating corroboration and I'm not against that. There's probably some merit in that approach. But I think, like, frequently is the case, they went from one extreme to the other and then pretty soon corroboration became like a dirty word. And so when you would say, OK, I got this allegation, now I'm gonna look for corroborative evidence and then people would look at you like you were some bad person and they would say, “You mean you don't believe the children?'” And you'd go, “Oh, I do, I do believe. I do believe the children, but I just thought I might check it out.”

LISA: Growing public awareness and concern produced demands for legal reform. State after state changed its laws governing children's evidence through the decade. In Canada, there were new provisions that came in 1988. They made it easier for children to testify in court by allowing them to testify from behind a screen or via closed circuit television. It also eliminated the need for prosecutors to provide corroborating evidence of a child's allegation. Before this, children who reported being physically or sexually abused were not considered credible.

Now it was time to believe the children, not just in life but in court.

[Music]

LISA: Here's Ken in a CBC interview from 1990, at the height of the fears around Satanic ritual abuse.

ANCHOR 3: Special Agent Lanning, I'm going to ask you to deal first with the belief which is quite widespread out there now that there are just too many people telling too many stories that all sound the same for this not to be true.

KEN: It is in fact the exact reason why I'm so skeptical. I believe that it is certainly within the realm of possibility that a few people scattered around North America could be doing this and getting away with it. But after hearing of hundreds of them, I started to add them all up and what they come to is literally thousands of people murdering tens of thousands of other individuals and no evidence. I do not believe that this many people could get away with this many crimes for this long a period of time without leaving evidence behind. If it is going on, it is undoubtedly the greatest crime conspiracy in the history of mankind.

ANCHOR 3: Why do so many people believe it then? I know that one of the women on that-- on that tape said nobody wants to believe that little children are being tortured and killed. But the fact is, a lot of people do believe this. why do they?

KEN: Well I would totally disagree. What I would say is this is exactly what people want to believe. What people don't want to believe is that mothers and fathers abuse their children. hat they want to believe is in stranger danger. They want to believe in evil monsters. They want to believe in good and evil, black and white.

LISA: The idea that child molesters were strangers luring kids, gave people a villain they could teach their children to avoid. Once it was gone, Ken says a whole lot of people reached for another, older explanation. One that provided its own cold comfort. it was the devil's doing. Here's how Ken explains it now, 30 years later.

KEN: Two powerful things were at play here. One was this emerging idea that children don't lie about this stuff. We must believe the children. And at the same time, there was this idea that bad things, evil things were somehow related to the work of the devil. This seemed to be particularly true with any crimes that had one or both of these two characteristics: extreme violence or sexual perversion. So for example, I have never really heard anybody talking about Satanic white collar crime, Satanic bank fraud and embezzlement, or Satanic environmental pollution. And one of the things I quickly discovered is that people who religiously believe this, it was pretty much impossible to change their mind. But for the most part, there were people who devoted their lives to identifying and fighting child sexual abuse. And these people seemed to believe it simply because the victims said it.

LISA: Asking too many questions, really any show of skepticism, was dangerous. There's a somewhat personal preamble to “The Investigator's Guide to Allegations of 'Ritual' Child Abuse,” and it speaks volumes. Ken writes, "The issues of child sexual abuse and exploitation are a big part of my professional life's work. I have no reason to deny their existence or nature. In fact, I have done everything I can to make people more aware of the problem, and I did not lightly question the allegations of hundreds of victims."

Ken was facing his own accusations, that he was a Satanist who had infiltrated the FBI to orchestrate a coverup.

KEN: And they wanted to have congressional hearings to investigate me, and then other people wrote publications in which they claimed that I was the primary source of the witch hunt and the hysteria, because I wrote books about child sex rings. I came to the realization that that's what I was trained to do as an investigator, to listen to people, assess and evaluate what they told you, and attempt to corroborate it. And corroborating the allegation is one of the best things that you can do for a victim.

LISA: Despite the growing understanding of childhood sexual abuse, there were still fundamental gaps in knowledge about how to investigate these cases, how to properly interview children.

KEN: A lot of the training was being conducted by these mental health professionals and they were talking about how to get children to talk and using techniques that could have potentially had problems for investigative purposes. And so of course eventually as we began to learn more about this, the ones that became very important was leading and suggestive and repetitive questioning. How many times you asked a question, are they leading questions, what constitutes a leading question? So a lot of times these interviews were being done and they were being poorly conducted. But people didn't realize it. In 1983, they were state of the art. In 1993, they weren't. But the main thrust sometimes was just get the child to talk. You wanted to use these various techniques, and one of the most famous ones is the use of these anatomically correct dolls to interview the child. And how-- does that constitute a leading and suggestive question in and of itself, since most children don't play with dolls that have penises and vaginas. But the idea in the early 80s was to get the child to talk and once the child said it happened then you knew it happened because children don't lie about this, and you move forward with the case.

LISA: So why were children alleging abuse that never happened?

KEN: Now some people have focused on mental health professionals, I say overzealous interveners, because in these cases there's a whole spectrum of interveners including, in a lot of these cases, parents. In these cases the parents are interviewing the kids over and over and over again. And a lot of the leading and suggestive questioning is not being done by investigators and therapists, but done by parents who will deny with their dying breath that they do it. And I've had some of them turn over video and audio tapes to prove that they weren't asking leading and suggestive questions. And then when you listen or watch these tapes, what do you see? The worst leading and suggestive questions you've ever seen. So why would they turn it over as proof that they didn't do something that clearly indicates that they did? And that's because they truly and sincerely don't believe that they did what they're doing.

LISA: In trying to sort out how and why these cases unfolded the way they did, I stumbled on another puzzle piece. One that kind of blew my mind.

REPORTER 7: People speaking at this conference insist there's nothing new about using Satanic worship as a cover for crimes against children.

REPORTER 8: This seminar will help youth workers detect and deal with cases they can expect to encounter.

REPORTER 9: But a study has shown that of those who attend these seminars, half will diagnose patients as victims of ritual abuse.

LISA: Conferences, seminars, training sessions warning of the imminent threat of Satanic Ritual Abuse. One child trauma expert told a local California paper in the late 80s, "There isn't a conference on the topic on child abuse now that doesn't include a seminar on Satanic cults."

The seminars were attended by members of law enforcement and justice departments, along with social workers, counsellors and teachers. This was one of the key ways the panic spread.

I picture it like a milkweed pod when it finally bursts and all the seeds waft away on the wind. You never know where they'll take root. Go to one of these courses and you'd be trained by a self-styled expert in occult crimes. And there were many. In his report, Ken cites a popular book of the time called “Prepare For War,” written by an MD. It lists among the, quote, 'doorways' to Satanic power fortune tellers, horoscopes, fraternity oaths, vegetarianism, yoga, self-hypnosis, relaxation tapes, acupuncture, fantasy roleplaying games, adultery, homosexuality, pornography, judo, karate, and rock music. It was considered a serious resource for law enforcement when it came to these cases. Governments saw the emerging threat as grave enough to spur them to action. They began to equip public servants to combat it. And Saskatchewan was no exception. At least two of these training seminars were held in the province BEFORE the Martensville Nightmare. One was organized by the provincial government itself.

MARJALEENA: I've seen the list of all the attendees.

LISA: Marjaleena Repo, who sounded the alarm in Martensville.

MARJALEENA: And I was looking at them thinking, my God, this is where it comes from. And when you looked at the list it had all kinds of personnel, from the government, in social services, in various law, you know, different aspects of the law. It was lawyers galore.

LISA: And police?

MARJALEENA: Oh yes, police, police, police. I knew one woman who'd attended, and so I talked to her about it. It was a nightmare. She said by the third day, “we suspected each other. We were told that they're infiltrating everything and I was scared out of the my skull and nobody wanted to talk to anybody and-- and I was so glad to be out of there.” So you created a group paranoia.

LISA: I asked Martensville Police officer Randy Chudyk what he knew.

RANDY: Funny you should ask. Myself and a member from the RCMP attended the one in Prince Albert.

LISA: What was it like?

RANDY: Well, now for everyone listening, go back to to the end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s. There was a mass movement of people in North America, for sure, that believed that there was Satanic cults in every nook and cranny of your town. So if that was mentioned, of course people believed that. So we attended this course and the experts were from the States that had dealt with all these things and they explain, these are the things you're looking for.

They were in politics and government and police officers and judges and people that were in authoritative positions, and the secret society of whatever they were doing and the cults and and worshipping Satan. And it was kind of strange because it was-- you go, that doesn't happen in our community, that doesn't happen. And then you go on this course and you go, “Well I guess it could happen but you-- only those that are involved would probably know these things.”

LISA: These kinds of seminars are why so many professionals suspended their disbelief and it's why the cases of so-called Satanic ritual abuse all sounded like versions of the same story.

They were.

KEN: Where could they be getting the details from? That's a good question. And the answer is all these people network with each other. They’d all get together and go to seminars and discussions and they'd be told this is what Satanists do. And this is how they do it.

And so all that is planted through the use of these kinds of techniques, hypnosis and other ways that cause the spread of this kind of stuff. So many people say, well, you can't identify these cases unless you've been trained to learn about them. And some of that training becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

LISA: A disturbingly understandable and deeply tragic self-fulfilling prophecy. Perfectly designed for the fears of the time. But there's yet another thread that ties all of this together.

Another answer to where the hell all the talk of Satan and cults and robes and blood and rituals came from. And that answer is Canada. Specifically, Victoria, British Columbia.

[Crickets chirping and footsteps]

VOICE 1: On March 20^th…

VOICE 2: Run!

[Heavy breathing and running]

VOICE 1: ..only one movie experience this year will make you afraid to breathe.

VOICE 3: You won’t survive.

VOICE 2: We have to try.

VOICE 1: A Quiet Place: Part II. In theatres March 20^th. Tickets on sale now.

LISA: In the early 70s, a young woman named Michelle Smith begins to see a local psychiatrist to deal with her depression. The doctor's name is Lawrence Pazder. The treatment goes well and, soon enough, it ends. But a few years later, Michelle has a disturbing dream. Hundreds of tiny spiders crawling out of a gash on her arm. And she returns to Dr. Pazder to report it.

REPORTER 10: It was in Victoria where the case of Michelle Smith was documented. Under treatment, she unearthed childhood memories of a year spent with a coven of Satanists.

LISA: By 1980, Michelle and Lawrence Pazder had put out a book together called “Michelle Remembers.” And it was hugely popular. In it, the pair described the sadistic abuse they believed she had suffered as a child at the hands of a Satanic cult.

MICHELLE: When I was four or five, at first when I was taken by this group of people for 14 months, they were adults who increasingly hurt me more and more. 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.

ANCHOR 4: We've heard about, you know, eating feces and orgies and dismembering fetuses. These were things that you experienced?

MICHELLE: That's right. But if you were to ask me what frightened me most, it was the increasing sense that these adults were trying to destroy me as a person, not just my body.

LISA: Dr. Pazder uncovered these memories through hypnosis. And he believed Michelle's accounts wholeheartedly.

LAWRENCE PAZDER: It's 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 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.

LISA: Pazder, a devout Catholic, set about warning church leaders, meeting with Archbishops all over, even travelling to the Vatican to urge the Church to take heed of this demonic threat. Then, Pazder took it further, working to persuade the psychiatric community of the danger.

It was Pazder who coined the term “ritual abuse”. And, it worked. Ken Lanning and just about every other expert, if asked to pinpoint the spark that set off the hellfire will cite that book, “Michelle Remembers”. Michelle went on to marry Lawrence Pazder and work in his psychiatric office. Over time, it would be proved that most of what she claimed to remember could not have happened. She was attending school regularly, for example, during the year she said she was being held hostage by the cult. But neither Michelle nor Pazder, who is now deceased, ever recanted. To this day, Ken says he's never seen a proven case of Satanic Ritual Abuse. Even though there were thousands of related charges, in one case, nearly 30,000 in a single small town, scores of prosecutions, dozens of convictions and decades of prison time. They aren't evidence of an epidemic of Satanic abuse. They are evidence of just how many lives were torn apart by a widespread Satanic Panic. But Ken doesn't leave it there.

He will not go so far as to say there has never been ANY real case of abuse that happened in the context of a Satan worshiping cult. Just that he's never seen the evidence. After all, cults exist, childhood sexual abuse exists. So do pedophile rings, human trafficking, kidnapping, torture. It's not as far from reality as we might prefer. And for that, he's also attacked.

KEN: Yeah, I come down in the middle now. The middle is a pretty wide place. But I found a quote that's attributed to Abraham Lincoln, I'm just paraphrasing now. If you're attacked by one side and not the other and so on and so forth, you may want to have a concern. If you're attacked by both extremes, that's a sign that you may be doing something right. So I was blamed by both sides. And so I decided that I would take that as a compliment.

LISA: In 1995, back at the Saskatchewan Court of Appeals, lawyer Heather Leonoff is hoping this is where the Martensville Nightmare comes to an end.

HEATHER: Even in cases of mass hysteria, and you go back to the Salem Witch Trials, eventually people began to realize that this was all made up. You start to find the individuals whose mind-- rational thinking you can actually appeal to and in this case, it wasn't very difficult.

LISA: After months, the court of appeals rules on whether the convictions against Travis and the young offender should stand.

REPORTER 11: It's one more twist in one of the most sensational and puzzling court cases in Saskatchewan history.

LISA: Nearly every conviction is overturned. All but two. Two different panels of judges presided over the separate appeals, but both arrive at the same conclusions. That the children's allegations were tainted by leading and suggestive interviews and that encouraged the children to make allegations of abuse.

HEATHER: So you could see them being manipulated, you could see the children being given positive reinforcement every time they said something negative. “Tell me something else that they did? That's wonderful that you told me that. That's so brave of you. You're so good and we're so proud of you! Tell me something else that happened. Well, we're so proud of you.” I mean, it was just like watching what NOT to do. You couldn't have done it worse if you tried.

LISA: The judges find the children’s testimony contained inconsistencies, contradictions, and impossibilities. They also note the lack of evidence at the so-called Devil Church.

HEATHER: There's not a drop of blood. There's nothing, it's pristine and clean and it's on somebody else's property. And they’ve-- this is going on for months and months, but they've never seen a human being in their place. They've never seen anybody break in. They've never seen any signs of anybody there.

LISA: And finally, the judges agree there is no conclusive medical or psychological evidence. No independent evidence AT ALL that supports the allegations. The judges emphasize in their decisions that children are not inherently unreliable or untruthful, but that in these cases, there is simply a lack of credible evidence.

[Music]

LISA: All convictions against the young offender are quashed. But Travis is found guilty of the sexual assault of two young girls: the nine-year-old who reported in 1988 she had been groped by Travis and the two year old whose parents' report to police began Claudia Bryden's investigation. Marjaleena Repo and others I spoke with see Travis as a scapegoat. Convicted so the justice system could save face.

MARJALEENA: He was the sacrificial lamb. You know, somebody had to be convicted.

LISA: I asked Heather about it.

So your client on appeal-- many of the convictions were overturned.

HEATHER: Overturned, yes.

LISA: But not all. Do you feel that-- that the outcome was just?

HEATHER: So that's always the difficult question. The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal had a reason for upholding two lesser offenses of sexual assault because the evidence was a bit different on those two cases. It did not arise through this gross manipulation of children.

LISA: The results of the appeals presented a clear picture of what happened in Martensville, or what little did. And that should have closed the book on the Martensville Nightmare. But it didn't. That sense that it wasn't clear who to believe or what had really happened that took hold in 1992, it persists for many. To this day.

ALAN: Some of the stuff was a little bizarre and I almost think that made it more difficult for people to believe the parts that were more believable, but I don't know. I just-- I don't have any full police records from what they got from investigation. I just don't know.

LISA: 30 years ago, Alan Bishoff lived part time on a small farm just outside of Martensville with his wife and teenaged son.

ALAN: Our place was about two miles north, two and a half miles north of Martensville. And it's just-- it was a small town we drove past.

LISA: Alan was working a construction job in a town five hours away. He and his wife were divorcing and things were tense. So when he was home, Alan spent most of his time in a big shed he'd built on the property, back from the house and off to the side. He put a bed out there and a fridge and that's where he'd camp out, in the outbuilding with the blue siding.

ALAN: I recall getting a phone call from a CBC reporter asking me, like, what do you know? And I ended up asking the reporter, what do you know? Because I just, I didn't know anything.

LISA: His shed ends up in newspapers and magazines. Only, it's not his shed anymore. It's the Devil Church.

ALAN: And, like, I had had some sheep at the time and I, you know, I mean I guess you could keep sheep for pets or for wool but I ate 'em. And part of-- there's a step in that process when the sheep goes from being alive to being dead and, you know, I wouldn't have dug a hole and buried the head-- the heads were left around and so I guess somebody found these sheep heads and decided that was part of some kind of cult movement.

LISA: The cult, the one Martensville Police Chief Mike Johnston said was called the Brotherhood of the Ram. Alan ends up being a witness in court after he passed a polygraph.

ALAN: They wanted to be sort of rock-solid sure that I wasn't leading a double life or something like that.

LISA: Alan has every reason to doubt the stories he's hearing from police and reporters. He knows first hand. The freezer. The cage. The axe. They were for meat. For hatchlings. For chopping wood.

ALAN: Yeah, there was a young police woman. I saw her as someone who had the guts to sort of take on what seemed to be being covered up, and I guess in a sense, for a time, she was to me the hero in this thing. And then it ended up the suggestion was that she had questioned the children inappropriately so that the information she had was not valid and she may have become the villain in the thing. And I guess some-- some resolution of that, some clarity as to her role in that.

LISA: It's so striking to me that even a person who testified in the court cases, who owned and built and slept in the so-called Devil Church, this many years later does not feel he knows what happened, despite the overwhelming evidence that little did.

ALAN: You know, did something happen or not, and certainly from the anecdotal stuff I think there's good reason to believe something did happen. But on the court record, I think it would now stand that nothing happened. And I don't know, that's a little bit disconcerting for me.

LISA: The feeling that something must have happened, the fear that those involved were powerful enough to cover it up, and the deep mistrust of the courts when it comes to matters of sexual violence, they've all left this lingering doubt in any kind of official narrative.

ALAN: As I suggested before, some kind of debriefing at the end of it might have been, sort of, where they call it closure so you can put it away. I live with a woman now, and she was convinced that when some of these children hit their adult years that they would sort of reopen this and speak their piece. But to my knowledge that hasn't happened at all and I don't know what follow up is possible from that point of view.

LISA: Neither do I. But I do know that a whole lot of people want to hear what the children have to say.

[Music]

LISA: Next on Satanic Panic…

CLAUDIA: Outside of the court system, these kids have no voice. They've had no voice.

HEATHER: The Saskatchewan government had a duty to fix some of the harm that they had caused. Who they really owed a duty to were the children who had been manipulated by the adults to say things that fit the adults’ agenda.

KRISTIN GALVIN: I feel like I've been traumatized, but it wasn't by my preschool. It was by living as someone who was thought of to have had these things or horrible things happen to them.

[Music]

LISA: Uncover: Satanic Panic is written & produced by me, Lisa Rundle, and Ilina Ghosh.

Mixing and sound design by Evan Kelly.

Chris Oke is our story editor.

Emilie Quesnel is our digital producer.

Evan Aagard is our video producer.

Original music by Olivia Pasquarelli.

Tanya Springer is the Senior Producer of CBC Podcasts.

Arif Noorani is our Executive Producer.

Special thanks to ABC and NBC for archival material.

If you want to know more about “Michelle Remembers” and how a dubious memoir helped set off a decade of Satanic Panic, we've got a video for that.

Check it out on the CBC Podcasts Facebook page.

ANNOUNCER: For more CBC original podcasts, go to cbc.ca/originalpodcasts.

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TRANSCRIPT: UNCOVER: SATANIC PANIC - EP 5

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