Remembering Satan (3 page)

Paul’s father, Sylvester, was a carpenter, an accountant, and
a jack-of-all-trades who suffered from chronic ill health. His mother, Elizabeth, was a dietitian who held the family together during the hard times that followed a back injury to Sylvester in 1954. The children always had shoes and food, but little else. As the oldest of seven, Paul became the official babysitter and a virtual parent. His sister Robin recalls him as caring and self-sacrificing, and says he never expressed resentment at the extra burden he carried.

The family that Paul would help create resembled in many ways the family in which he grew up. Both of his parents were strict disciplinarians. Paul always felt that they showed much more love for each other than they showed for their children—a bitter observation that his own children came to echo. And however attentive and protective he may have been as an older brother, as a father Paul was a martinet, full of rules and prohibitions.

Sandy had been the youngest of four children and very much the family pet. She had a sweet, spunky disposition, and a stubborn streak that kept Paul from running over her. Although there had been a history of mental illness in her family, neither Sandy nor Paul worried about the possibility of a hereditary problem. Sandy, especially, wanted a large family; Paul wasn’t so sure, but he didn’t resist the idea. They set up housekeeping in a two-bedroom rented house in Spokane.

Paul Jr., also called Paul Ross by the family, was born in September of 1965, seven months after the wedding. With this new responsibility on his shoulders, Paul took a job as a building supervisor at a medical center. Months after Paul Ross’s birth, Sandy learned she was pregnant again, this time with twins. Ericka and Andrea were born in September of 1966. Andrea, the firstborn, was underweight and sickly; Ericka was plump and healthy. Sandy took the younger twin home after a few days, but Andrea remained in the hospital for a week, and when she finally did come home she remained listless. The
doctors assured Sandy that there was nothing wrong, Andrea was merely small; but a few days later she seemed to stop breathing. The panicked young parents rushed to the hospital with their gasping infant, who had turned blue as she struggled to breathe. Tests determined that she had spinal meningitis. A priest came to baptize her and administer the last rites, but Andrea confounded the doctors’ expectations and survived. The meningitis, however, caused her brain to swell, with the result that her mental faculties were severely damaged and her skull was permanently enlarged.

The Ingrams quickly outgrew their little house. In early 1967 they bought, for $6,900, a three-bedroom house that had been repossessed by the Veterans Administration. The house was surrounded by a four-foot-high cyclone fence, which Paul Ross managed to scale while he was still in diapers. Sandy usually found him in the neighborhood, playing with other children, although twice she had to call in the police to locate him. From then on, he was kept on a leash when he played outdoors.

Paul hit the road, selling cameras door-to-door. It was his first real chance to travel, and he loved it, but the income never really covered their expenses. Sandy started looking after other people’s children to take up the slack. Meanwhile, Andrea was in and out of the hospital with chronic attacks of pneumonia, and her needs became too great for the couple to handle. When she was still a baby, they sent her to a state institution, where she spent the rest of her life.

Sandy gave birth to a second son, Chad, in 1968. Paul, bowing to reality, took a more reliable job, as a field investigator with the Retail Credit Company. Later that same year, the company offered openings in several other cities. Moving would bring a pay raise and a chance for advancement. Paul and Sandy decided on Olympia, because it was small and semi-rural and appealed to their back-to-nature ideals. They bought
a house trailer and moved it to the Flying Carpet mobile home park, in East Olympia. Soon Sandy was getting paid to look after other children in the camp. The income she provided was essential for the family, especially in those early days, but her own children came to feel that she paid more attention to the day-care children than to them.

Before long the expanding Ingram family was eager to move to larger quarters. When their fifth child, Julie, was born, in 1970, they secured a bank loan of $17,500 and built a three-bedroom house on a wooded lot in East Olympia. The boys shared one bedroom, and the girls shared another. Later they finished the basement, adding another bedroom and a recreation room. At last they had room for Sandy’s garden and for the farm animals that Paul hoped would make them self-sufficient. He sold Amway products and a brand of dehydrated foods on the side. Shadowed by need throughout his own childhood, he was relentless in his drive to create security. From his point of view, he was being a good provider and giving his children an opportunity he had never had. But they began to feel that he valued them more as workers than as sons and daughters. “The old man didn’t give a shit about anybody as long as you did your chores,” Paul Ross later complained.

In 1969, almost as a lark, Paul applied to the reserve corps of the police department in Lacey, a small (there were only eight stoplights) adjoining township. He was accepted and began driving around in the evenings and on weekends with a borrowed pistol, doing traffic duty and handling domestic disputes. Within a few months he had learned enough about police work that he qualified to drive patrol on his own. Never in his life had he enjoyed anything so much. Paul thought of his police work as a hobby that brought in some additional money, but it also meant that he was spending almost no time at home with Sandy and the children. Chad had to teach himself
how to ride a bike; later, he taught himself to drive a car as well.

In 1971, Paul moved from the Lacey Police Department to the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, and a year later the sheriff asked him to join the staff full-time. That meant a pay cut of a hundred dollars a month, which the family could scarcely afford; but Sandy supported Paul because he so obviously enjoyed the work. For the most part, Paul did well, although once in training class he made the mistake of offering his opinion that sheriffs should be appointed, not elected; the following morning he was invited into the chief deputy’s office and thoroughly chewed out. The experience put him on guard about the politics of the office.

Paul quickly made friends in the department. He and Neil McClanahan, then another rookie, spent a lot of time together carpooling in the county car they shared. They often talked about religion, a subject of interest to both of them. At the time, Paul was still a Catholic, although he would eventually convert to a Protestant denomination; Neil was headed in the opposite direction. A deeply religious man, McClanahan was studying the catechism of the Catholic church and preparing for his own conversion.

Their spiritual pursuits and interest in civic service set them apart from most police officers, but neither man wanted to come across as a prude. Both joined a rotating poker game, along with several other deputies. Sometimes the game took place at the Ingrams’ house. These games became so important to Paul that he installed a refrigerator in the basement recreation room to hold a keg of beer. No doubt, being a host to other members of the department, including the sheriff himself, enhanced Paul’s standing and made him one of the guys. The morning after a poker party, the children would scour the floor under the table for loose change.

In 1972, Paul began having an affair with an older, divorced woman. Paul felt that he could discuss with her matters other than child rearing and the routine details of domestic life. His lover was a Lutheran, and she talked about her personal relationship with Jesus in terms that Paul had never heard in seminary. The affair foundered when it became clear that Paul would never leave Sandy. Although he was going to Mass less and less often, he was still enough of a Catholic not to believe in divorce.

Paul and Sandy’s frugality, meanwhile, was paying off. They bought an old Ford pickup with a camper shell, and the family began spending summer vacations camping in Idaho. In 1976, they bought five acres of logged-off property on Fir Tree Road, with an option on an adjacent five acres. With characteristic energy, they began clearing the land in their spare time. Friends from the Olympia Police Department helped them put in a septic tank and grade a low spot into a pond. A nearby gravel pit provided material for a road at a bargain price. When carpenters finished the two-story house on the property, Paul and Sandy painted it together, inside and out. Jim Rabie, a detective in the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office and a friend of Paul’s, came to wire it, and Rabie’s father built the kitchen cabinets.

At last, Paul and Sandy’s dreams were realized. Their handsome home was surrounded by fir, alder, ash, cottonwood, cedar, and hemlock. In the spring, the dogwoods bloomed, and deer poked around in the bush. The woods were full of raccoons and possums and grouse, and there was an occasional red fox. There were ducks and herons in the pond. Sandy expanded her garden, making room for fruit trees and flowering plants. In addition to the chickens and rabbits that Paul raised, there was enough land to graze a few cows. It felt like paradise to Paul and Sandy, but not to their children, who thought of the place as remote and isolated.

The police investigators would interview many friends and neighbors of the Ingram family. Most described Paul and Sandy as ordinary folks who loved their children, even if they were strict. The most severe punishments meted out in the household included spanking for the younger children and being grounded for the older ones; usually it was a matter of withholding television or dessert. After the parents became devout fundamentalists, they didn’t allow their children to participate in sports and rarely let them go to games or involve themselves in other extracurricular activities that might get in the way of chores or schoolwork. This was hardest on Chad, a natural athlete. “They weren’t allowed to be kids,” a neighbor observed, but the children always seemed well-mannered. Ericka and Julie were popular baby-sitters. One of the daughters’ friends said that their dad was always yelling and that the brothers “goofed off and did weird things,” although the only example of weirdness she could offer was that Chad had once tried to kiss her. A woman who had grazed a horse on the Ingram property said that Paul had called her and threatened to kill the animal if she didn’t remove it right away. Every inch of his property had a purpose, he said; nothing was left for recreation.

The family doctor stated he had never seen any signs of abuse in the children. The Ingrams seemed healthy, for the most part. Ericka had a spate of heavy, irregular menstrual bleeding when she was sixteen, but that was common in the first three years of menstruation. Paul and Sandy belonged to a tennis club, and they played three times a week. At night, they all held hands and prayed before eating a big family dinner. The food was fresh, if somewhat rustic, although roasted rabbit and goat stew were not thought of as being terribly exotic in a region of the country where game was still a large part of the ordinary diet and self-sufficiency was held in high esteem. Sandy was always baking or stirring up something in
the kitchen. She was a “perfect homemaker,” said an admiring friend, who had once leased a trailer on the Ingram property. During that time the friend never observed anything unusual happening. Everyone who knew them described the Ingrams as a hardworking, Christian family; in fact, several people told the investigators that they had tried to model their own families on the Ingrams.

The previous year, Sandy had begun attending services at the Evergreen Christian Center, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God. Paul was surprised, because Sandy had been deeply involved with their Catholic church, singing in the choir and teaching the catechism class. But he noticed a change in her right away—a softening, which he found very appealing. She began taking the children to the center on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. Eventually Paul went too, and he liked the open, welcoming atmosphere, although the hand waving and speaking in tongues put him off. A month later, however, Paul responded to an altar call and surrendered his life to Jesus. That fall, the entire family was baptized in the deep water.

The Ingrams were drawn to Pentecostalism in part because of its emphasis on the importance of the family. And yet, in the Ingram household, a troubling rift was developing between the parents and the children. Paul and Sandy were demonstrably affectionate with each other; indeed, there was a sexual charge between them that others could hardly miss. (They slept in the nude on a waterbed, and according to Paul they had sex nearly every other day.) With their children, however, they were stern and emotionally reserved. Sex was never discussed, except when the girls told Sandy that they intended to remain virgins until they married. There were few outlets for the children’s emotional needs and youthful energy, however. Once the family joined the new congregation, Paul outlawed all sports activities and banned rock-and-roll music unless it was
Christian. Tensions worsened in 1978, when Sandy found herself pregnant again. After the child, a third son, named Mark, was born, Paul decided that he was going to make an effort to be a better father. Over time, the older children came to feel that Mark was their father’s favorite; he was coddled rather than ordered around and put to work. Nearly every night, Paul read to Mark at bedtime—something that he had never done with the others—and later he bought the boy a computer and spent many evenings playing computer games with him. Ericka and Julie both complained that Mark was being spoiled.

The two older boys were rebellious and showed a disturbing tendency to live secret lives. In 1984, at the age of eighteen, Paul Ross turned down an appointment to West Point which his father had arranged, and then abruptly left home after wrecking his car for the third time in three months. He parked the car in a cemetery and left behind a note to Sandy saying that he had fallen in with a dangerous crowd. He warned his parents not to try to find him. “When you get this letter I’ll probably be somewhere in South America,” he wrote. Investigators later found the note in Sandy’s desk. Their second son, Chad, whom Paul and Sandy considered the quietest and most even-tempered of their children, moved into an apartment in downtown Olympia for a short time during high school, and was arrested for shoplifting candy. Later, he went to Bible school in Tulsa, dropped out, and came back home to live.