The Satanic Panic: When America Destroyed Families Over Crimes That Never Happened
This is the third in a series. See also: “The Multiple Personality Industry: Psychiatry’s Dress Rehearsal for the Autism Epidemic“
In 1984, Scott and Brenda Kniffen of Bakersfield, California were convicted of sexually abusing their own children in satanic rituals—part of what prosecutors claimed was an organized cult. Their two young sons had testified against them, describing blood rituals and animal sacrifice.
There was one problem: it never happened.
The boys had repeatedly denied abuse. They accused their parents only after being told they could go home if they did. The satanic elements emerged later, after repeated interviews by investigators who had been trained to look for exactly that—using a book called Michelle Remembers as their guide.
In 1992, both sons recanted. In 1996, a court vacated the convictions, citing faulty forensic evidence and substantial police and prosecutorial misconduct. The Kniffens were released after twelve years in prison.
The Kniffens were not unusual. They were typical.
The Record
This is not speculation. It is documented history.
Debbie Nathan’s books Satan’s Silence and Sybil Exposed chronicle the era in exhaustive detail.
The 1992 FBI analysis by Supervisory Special Agent Kenneth Lanning reported no evidence for satanic ritual abuse.
PBS Frontline produced Innocence Lost on the Little Rascals case in North Carolina. [Available at littlerascalsdaycarecase.org]
Witch Hunt (2008), narrated by Sean Penn, documented the Kern County cases.
Satan Wants You (2023) traces the panic back to Michelle Remembers.
The National Registry of Exonerations lists case after case.
The story that follows is documented history. The question is why so few people know it.
The Origin
The panic began with a book.
In 1980, Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder published Michelle Remembers, co-authored with his patient (later his wife) Michelle Smith. The book claimed Smith had recovered memories of satanic ritual abuse during therapy. Pazder popularized the term “ritual abuse.”
The book was later debunked—Smith’s claims contradicted verifiable facts about her childhood—but not before it became a template. Pazder advised investigators in the McMartin Preschool case (discussed below). His techniques spread through law enforcement training seminars. Soon investigators across America were finding exactly what they had been trained to find.
For those who read my substack “The Multiple Personality Industry: Psychiatry’s Dress Rehearsal for the Autism Epidemic,” this may all be starting to have a familiar ring to it.
The Contagion
Between 1982 and the mid-1990s, hundreds of Americans were accused of participating in satanic ritual abuse of children. A 1992 FBI analysis by Kenneth Lanning reported no evidence for any of it.
The accusations followed a familiar pattern. Children in daycare or custody disputes would be subjected to repeated, leading interviews by investigators trained to believe that satanic cults had infiltrated American childcare. The interviewers used techniques now recognized as coercive: tweaking questions until children provided the expected answers, ignoring denials, rewarding accusations with approval and the promise of going home.
The resulting testimony was spectacular. Children described being flown in airplanes to distant locations for abuse, then returned in time for their parents to pick them up. They described watching animals slaughtered—including, in one case, giraffes and elephants. They described secret underground tunnels, drinking blood-laced Kool-Aid, being flushed down toilets to hidden rooms.
No physical evidence was ever found. When investigators searched for the underground tunnels, they found nothing.
The Most Famous Case: McMartin Preschool
If you’re old enough, you remember McMartin.
In August 1983, Judy Johnson told police in Manhattan Beach, California that her two-and-a-half-year-old son had been molested by Ray Buckey, a teacher at the Virginia McMartin Preschool. The boy couldn’t identify Buckey from photos. No physical evidence was found. Buckey was arrested and released the same day.
Then the police made a decision that would ignite a national hysteria: they sent a letter to parents naming Buckey as a suspect and urging them to question their children about specific sex acts.
The Children’s Institute International, a Los Angeles abuse therapy clinic, was brought in to interview the children. Using techniques now recognized as grossly suggestive—leading questions, tweaking answers, telling children what other children had said—they found exactly what they were looking for. Hundreds of children eventually made accusations.
Johnson’s own allegations grew increasingly bizarre. She claimed Ray “flew in the air,” that Peggy Buckey “drilled a child under the arms,” that her son had been taken to a church where a baby was beheaded and the children were forced to drink the blood. She later experienced serious mental health problems and died of alcohol-related liver disease in 1986, before the trial began.
Seven teachers were indicted. By 1986, a new district attorney had dropped charges against five of them, calling the evidence “incredibly weak.” Ray Buckey spent five years in jail awaiting trial.
The trial lasted seven years and cost $15 million—one of the longest and most expensive criminal trials in American history.
The result: no convictions. Ray Buckey and his mother Peggy were acquitted on all counts that went to verdict. The jury deadlocked on the rest. A retrial ended in another deadlock, and all charges were dismissed.
In 2005, one of the children—now an adult—spoke publicly. “Never did anyone do anything to me, and I never saw them doing anything,” Kyle Zirpolo told the Los Angeles Times. “I said a lot of things that didn’t happen. I lied. ... Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for.”
McMartin was the most famous case. It was not the worst.
The Amplifiers
Television spread the panic nationwide.
In October 1988, Geraldo Rivera’s special “Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground” treated claims of a large, organized satanic underground as credible and reached a huge audience. Such claims were treated credulously in the era’s talk-show coverage.
But it wasn’t just tabloid talk shows. In May 1985, ABC’s 20/20 aired “The Devil Worshippers,” featuring Lawrence Pazder himself. This was network news treating satanic conspiracy claims seriously.
A 1994 60 Minutes segment on false memories, the 1995 HBO film Indictment: The McMartin Trial, and a wave of skeptical journalism shifted public perception. By mid-decade, the same outlets that had amplified the hysteria were questioning it.
Years later, Rivera said he’d been wrong—and that innocent people had gone to prison.
By then, of course, those people were already in prison. Public accountability was rare.
The Toll
Life is not a Hollywood movie where everything is cleanly resolved. When you’re accused of sexually abusing children, you face a terrible choice: go to trial and risk decades in prison, or take a plea deal for a lesser sentence. Many pled guilty to crimes that never happened. Many served their time before anyone reconsidered. Some are still on sex offender registries and some are likely still in prison.
This op-ed cannot retry thousands of cases. What I can point to are some of the exonerations—the cases where the record was formally corrected.
The Kniffens served twelve years before their sons recanted and a court threw out the convictions. John Stoll served twenty years before his conviction was overturned. “It never happened,” one of the children who had testified against him said. “I lied.”
Dan and Fran Keller of Texas served twenty-one years for crimes that included—according to the children’s testimony—dismembering babies, flying children to Mexico to be raped by soldiers, and serving blood-laced Kool-Aid. In 2017, they were declared “actually innocent” and received $3.4 million in compensation. The doctor who provided the only physical evidence at trial had recanted. In 2023, Melvin Quinney of Texas was exonerated after more than thirty years—the unwinding continues.
In Wenatchee, Washington, 43 adults were arrested on nearly 30,000 charges. The investigation was later criticized for relying on coercive interviews; many convictions were eventually overturned.
These are the ones who got formal vindication. Thousands of others took plea deals, served their sentences, or died in prison. For them, there was no exoneration—just a destroyed life.
No corroborating evidence was ever found for any of the satanic ritual abuse allegations. As interview standards changed and courts grew skeptical, new prosecutions stopped. By the late 1990s, the phenomenon had ended.
But for those who had already been convicted, the ending came too late.
The Junk Science
The cases relied on interview techniques now recognized as fundamentally flawed.
Repeated leading questions. Refusal to accept denials. Promises that children could go home if they gave the “right” answers. These produced consistent accusations and inconsistent facts.
A central dogma of the era was that “children don’t lie about sex.” But researchers like Maggie Bruck and Stephen Ceci later demonstrated that children can be coached into highly detailed false testimonies—not because children are liars, but because human memory is reconstructive. Authority figures using leading questions aren’t just “finding” memories; they can inadvertently create them.
The allegations rarely started with satanic rituals. They began with a single question about “touching” and, through repeated interviews, escalated into increasingly fantastical claims—robots, tunnels, animal sacrifice—as children learned what answers satisfied the adults in the room. Each round of questioning rewarded more elaborate disclosures.
Meanwhile, law enforcement ignored the physical impossibility of the claims. No tunnels. No bodies. No missing children matching the alleged thousands of sacrifices. The testimony was treated as infallible precisely because questioning it meant questioning the children—and who would do that?
The Retreat
By the mid-1990s, the panic subsided. Convictions were overturned. Lawsuits were filed. Some defendants later received settlements.
Official accountability remained elusive. The district attorney who oversaw the Kern County prosecutions stayed in office for years afterward. No commission investigated what went wrong. No reforms were mandated. No one in authority said: we were wrong, here is what happened, here is what we have changed to ensure it never happens again.
But accountability came from another direction: civil litigation.
The same recovered-memory therapists who had “uncovered” satanic abuse in their patients began facing lawsuits—from those very patients. As the scientific consensus turned against recovered memory therapy, former patients started realizing that the memories they’d “recovered” had been iatrogenically implanted. They sued.
Bennett Braun, the psychiatrist who had done more than anyone to mainstream the MPD-satanic abuse connection, had his medical license suspended in Illinois in 1999 and was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association. His patient Patricia Burgus won a $10.6 million settlement from Rush Presbyterian hospital after Braun had convinced her, under hypnosis and heavy sedation, that she had been a satanic high priestess who cannibalized her own children. She hadn’t. None of it was real. She had simply been a vulnerable patient in the hands of a therapist who found what he was trained to find.
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, founded in 1992 by parents who had been falsely accused by their adult children’s therapists, documented case after case. By the late 1990s, malpractice insurers were refusing to cover recovered-memory therapy. The industry collapsed—not because regulators acted, but because the lawsuits made it uninsurable.
This is how it ended. Not with a reckoning, but with liability.
The Other Epidemic
The Satanic Panic did not occur in isolation. It ran parallel to another manufactured crisis: the Multiple Personality Disorder epidemic.
Clinicians reported that a substantial percentage of MPD patients also “recovered” memories of satanic ritual abuse during therapy. The techniques were identical—hypnosis, guided imagery, leading questions, refusal to accept denials. The therapists overlapped. The conferences overlapped. Bennett Braun, whose $10.6 million settlement helped end the recovered-memory industry, was a founding figure in both movements—a leader in the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation, and a leading proponent of satanic cult theories.
The patients were often the same people. Patricia Burgus entered therapy for postpartum depression and emerged convinced she had hundreds of personalities and had eaten her own children in satanic rituals. The diagnosis and the delusion arrived together, delivered by the same techniques, in the same clinic.
Both epidemics relied on the same premise: that hidden trauma, inaccessible to ordinary memory, could be excavated by specialized experts using specialized techniques. Both produced accusations that grew more elaborate over time. Both collapsed when the evidence was examined—but not before hundreds of lives were destroyed.
Modern Day Salem Witch Trials
This series examines psychiatric and medical epidemics that followed the same pattern: a diagnosis category expands, an industry forms around treatment, practitioners find what they’re trained to find, and skeptics are silenced as deniers. The MPD epidemic and the Satanic Panic were two faces of the same phenomenon—credentialed experts creating patients through the act of diagnosis itself. The autism epidemic may be another.
The medical community must understand that the public is not interested in or able to discern all the many factions within that community. The next time you are alarmed that people don’t trust big pharma or vaccines, ask yourself what horrible things those communities allowed and even supported. The medical community does not like to admit what they did and allowed, but everyone knows what happened, so the denial just increases the skepticism. This series of op-eds is only one such theme.
We may be in the midst of a burgeoning new one to be discussed in a follow on op-ed.
In this series:
Sidebar: Did the Medical Community Learn?
Bennett Braun was a central figure in both the MPD and Satanic Panic epidemics. He co-founded the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation and served on the DSM-III-R advisory committee for dissociative disorders. He trained therapists in the techniques that destroyed families.
In 1997, he paid $10.6 million to settle Patricia Burgus’s lawsuit. In 1999, Illinois suspended his medical license. In 2000, the American Psychiatric Association expelled him.
In 2003, Montana licensed him anyway, despite the Illinois discipline and national controversy.
Braun practiced psychiatry in Montana for seventeen more years.
In 2021, Montana finally revoked his license—for overprescribing medication to a patient, not for anything related to the satanic abuse cases.
Bennett Braun died in March 2024 at age 83. He never admitted wrongdoing.