The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (27 page)

‘So you’ve always been one step ahead of the curve?’ I say.

She nods. ‘And that’s horrible. Because you know you’re going to get bashed up.’

Dr Sinason’s father was Stanley S. Segal, a campaigner on behalf of children with learning difficulties. His influential book
No Child is Ineducable
is, she proudly tells me, ‘the reason why disabled children go to school today, instead of hospital. His motto, which I put to treating survivors of satanist abuse, was “I shall not pass them by, nor throw them crumbs.” If you know something’s true, you can’t turn your back. You’re a witness.’

‘So the great lesson of your family is: listen to people,’ I say.

‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘Absolutely. Everybody can say something of their history. We must bear witness.’

Carole’s medical records contain a letter, written by Sinason, that says she was ‘the first patient Rob Hale and I worked with who had experienced chronic sadistic abuse’. Without mentioning Carole’s name, I ask her about her ‘first patient’. She describes a visit by two medical professionals – one a nurse with a limp, the other a psychologist.

‘I just had that nasty feeling,’ she recalls. ‘It’s her. It’s her, and she’s been hurt by them.’

‘You could tell that from the
limp
?’ I ask.

‘Yep.’

Dr Sinason insists that she does not practise recovered-memory techniques. ‘I don’t use direct questions,’ she says. ‘I’m an analytic therapist. The idea of that is someone showing, through their words or behaviour, that all sorts of things might have happened to them – things that there might not initially be logical words for.’

For Dr Sinason, signifiers that a patient has suffered at the hands of a satanist might include flinching at green or purple, because those are the colours of the robes of the high priest and priestess. Another is when patients say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What they really mean is, “I can’t bear to say.”’ Dr Sinason also goes on high alert when she judges that a patient is praising their family with too much enthusiasm. ‘The more insecure you are, the more you praise. “Oh, my family were wonderful! I can’t remember any of it!”’

‘And that’s a sign?’ I say.

‘Absolutely.’

I tell her that campaigning organisations, such as the British False Memory Society, deny that satanist abuse even exists.

‘You’ve got to remember that it’s allegedly “innocent” parents that join false memory societies,’ she says. ‘Among the groups that very loudly say “this isn’t true” there are, of course, a certain percentage of abusers. They’re in all the professions as well.’

‘Which professions?’

‘Every profession.’

As well as ritual abuse, Dr Sinason is an expert in people who claim to possess multiple independent personalities which they apparently switch between helplessly, with each personality often being unaware of the others. Known as ‘dissociative identity disorder’, it is a condition which many mainstream psychologists, such as Professors Chris French and Elizabeth Loftus, insist doesn’t actually exist, but from which Carole supposedly suffered. At first, I am unsure if multiple personalities are even relevant to the allegations of satanism. I begin to detect a link, though, when I ask Dr Sinason
what happens when she reports her clients’ claims to the police.

‘The problem with going to the police is that if somebody has a dissociative disorder, it’s no good if one person comes to you and says, “I want to go the police because this has happened,” because you don’t know if there are other personalities that will then contradict the evidence.’

‘So when the police arrive to take evidence, another personality emerges?’ I clarify.

‘And says, “It’s all lies,” and the police give up,’ she nods.

Dr Sinason admits that some of her patients initially have no memory of satanist abuse. This, she says, is because ‘Someone’s main personality can be functioning perfectly. They can go to therapy for years and all the trauma is buried in other states of mind.’

‘So you might have one personality with no memory of ritual abuse and another with all the memories?’

‘Exactly. Exactly.’

I ask Dr Sinason about patients who make impossible claims, such as being raped by world-famous individuals. ‘It could be misinformation,’ she says, and offers an example of a patient of hers who insisted that she had been raped by Margaret Thatcher. ‘From the way she described it, I could see this had been deliberately done,’ she says. ‘She’d been drugged and people used
Spitting Image
masks. Just like some of the children I saw who had been abused by people wearing Mickey Mouse masks.’

Suddenly recalling ‘lost’ memories of satanic abuse, claiming to have been raped by Margaret Thatcher, confessions to the police that ‘it’s all lies’ – it all might lead the dispassionate observer to conclude that the patient is unreliable: lying or delusional or developing false memories. Not for Dr Sinason. For her, with DID fully inveigled into the story’s plotline, it comes to represent powerful evidence that they have multiple personalities and that satanists are canny.

I have no doubt that Dr Sinason believes what she is telling me. But everything I have learned so far about the brain’s capacity to embrace evidence that reinforces its precious models, and dismiss everything that doesn’t, makes me suspicious of all this. I am fascinated, too, by what I can sense of her personal mission. Her father, a hero – responsible
for saving a generation of children with learning difficulties from hellish hospital lives. And so, the family quest: to serve those who have historically been dismissed by the mental-health establishment. To ‘bear witness’. To defend the dispossessed. To
believe
them.

But perhaps sceptical voices are too quick to dismiss the reality of ritual abuse. It is known, after all, that
paedophiles occasionally meddle with pagan rites and symbolism
. Satanic threats could feasibly be used to scare victims into silence. Perhaps Dr Sinason’s description of what exactly goes on at these events will actually turn out to be sober, realistic and credible.

When I ask her to describe some, she tells me that children are stitched inside the bellies of dying animals and are then ‘reborn to Satan.’ ‘Another one is being passed around the room and anally raped by everybody,’ she says. On other occasions, they are ‘made to eat faeces, menstrual blood, semen, urine, babies being cannibalised.’

‘So the cannibalism – that’s foetuses?’ I ask.

‘Foetuses and bits of bodies.’

‘Raw or cooked?’

‘The foetuses are raw.’

‘Not even salt and pepper?’ I ask.

‘Raw. And handed round.’

‘For everyone to have a nibble on? Like a cob of corn?’

‘Like communion,’ she says. ‘On one major festival, the babies are barbecued. I can still remember one survivor saying how easy it is to pull apart the ribs on a baby. But adults were tougher to eat.’

She goes on to describe large gatherings in woodlands and castles, which involve huge cloths being laid out. ‘That’s normally when there’s a sacrifice,’ she notes, ‘and because the rapes are happening all over the place. There’s a small amount of cannon fodder in terms of runaways that are drug addicts, prostitutes, tramps that are used.’

‘Tell me about the sex,’ I say. ‘What happens?’

‘Everything happens. Sex with animals. Horses, dogs, goats. Being hanged upside down. In the woods, on a tree.’

‘How do they get an animal to have sex with a human?’

David thinks for a moment and says, ‘Well, plenty of dogs have a go at people’s legs.’

‘True,’ says Dr Sinason, adding poignantly. ‘However horrible it sounds, the dog, at least, is friendly afterwards.’

‘Because at least the dog has a good time,’ I say.

‘And the child loves the pet,’ Dr Sinason nods. ‘The pet is made to have sex with that child – but the pet, at least, is still their friend.’

*

Having sat in the centre of the Sinasons’ wild kaleidoscope of beliefs, it seems obvious to me that the Felsteads are right in suspecting that Carole’s therapists had some unlikely views. But Sinason doesn’t enter Carole’s story until the early 1990s. Her abuse ‘memories’ – at least the initial ones – cannot be blamed on her. There is only one person that I know of who knew Carole during that period. I am convinced that Dr Fleur Fisher would know if Carole had received recovered-memory therapy. But I have tried and I have tried. She has vanished.

Then David Felstead gives me another lead. In among Carole’s phone records, he finds a possible home number for Dr Fisher. When I try, it goes to the answer-phone of another family. A few days later, in an act of utterly irrational desperation, I dial it again. This time someone picks up. To my astonishment, she says: ‘Oh yes, people call for Fleur Fisher sometimes. I’ll give you her number.’

Dr Fleur Fisher answers the phone with the all the headmistress-like authority you might expect of a former head of ethics at the British Medical Association. Sometimes confident, sometimes wary, sometimes maudlin and resigned, she actually has good reason to fear the Felsteads. After discovering she had taken Carole’s possessions, they reported her to the GMC and the police. Neither found sufficient evidence to act against her.

She admits that she had no legal claim to be Carole’s ‘next of kin’, but denies the Felsteads’ accusations that she stole her belongings. She emptied the flat, she says, because the property managers were demanding it. As she cleared up, she found the letter from Richard. ‘Honourably, I gave it to the police,’ she says. ‘Otherwise the family would never have known. Never, never, never!’ The clear-out happened on 7 July 2005, a date, of course, that became known as 7/7. The terrorist explosions crippled the public-transport network, which is why
she needed to take Carole’s car to get home. It was soon returned to London.

I ask why she phoned Richard on the day that the Felsteads were informed of the death. She did so, she says, because the coroner mentioned how crushed he had sounded. It is an act that she now regrets. ‘Concern for somebody else’s distress sometimes overcomes you,’ she says. ‘I was foolish. Unwise.’

Ironically, it was Dr Fisher’s discovery of Richard’s letter that led to the cancellation of the funeral. Was she upset when she heard it had been halted? ‘You can’t even imagine,’ she says. ‘I was giving a talk with the Bishop of Oxford. I just screamed and screamed.’

Finally, we get to the question of whether Carole’s memories of satanic abuse were recovered. Initially Fisher refuses to speak about Carole. ‘I have a duty of confidentiality, even after a patient has died. I was never her psychiatrist or psychotherapist or anything like that.’ She raises her voice. ‘I’m not a psychotherapist, for God’s sake!’

‘According to her medical notes, she saw you for counselling,’ I say.

‘No.’

‘I have the letter here. It’s dated 27 November 1986 and it says: “She required to see Dr Fisher for psychosexual counselling.”’

There is a silence.

‘Psychosexual is the wrong term,’ she says.

‘What’s the correct term?’

‘Uh, I really don’t know. People come and tell you things that have happened to them.’

‘Things like abuse?’

‘Things that have happened to them,’ she repeats, crossly. ‘I’m not saying anything else. It’s not right that this woman’s privacy should be breached in this way.’ She is shouting now. ‘She’s dead! She’s goddamned dead!’

‘Were you ever worried that Carole had lapsed into fantasy?’

‘Never,’ she says.

By 1997, I tell her, Carole was claiming that a former conservative cabinet minister had anally raped her with a claw hammer in the Conservative Central Office.

For a moment, she doesn’t speak.

‘That’s not something I knew about. It may have been fantasy,’ she says, adding darkly, ‘but I couldn’t say.’

‘Are you aware of any evidence that any of Carole’s claims actually happened?’

‘I never looked for any evidence.’

‘Then what made you believe her?’

‘She’s not the only patient I’ve had who told the same kinds of stories.’

‘About ritual abuse?’

‘It turned out to be that, yes. The people didn’t remember at first. They weren’t aware
. They were memories they’d had a long time and they just came out.’

And that, I decide, is all that I need to know. Before I ring off, I ask Fisher what Carole was like. ‘She was a feisty, brave, intelligent woman. She was funny. A good laugh.’ And then, softly at first, she starts crying.

*

As delusions and paranoias such as the ones Carole suffered are a common facet of schizophrenia, I seek the counsel of Dr Trevor Turner, the psychiatrist who mentioned false memories to me previously. ‘One of the classic symptoms of schizophrenia is the idea that your body has been interfered with,’ he tells me. ‘And it’s very common for people to develop extraordinary delusional beliefs. If you talk to families of people who have got schizophrenia, the number of them who have been accused of things is huge.’

If Turner’s observations are correct and Carole was schizophrenic, I wonder what effect it might have had on her, having therapists validate her darkest delusions. What would it be like for someone with paranoid fantasies to have it confirmed that, yes, there really
are
satanists out there, trying to get you? ‘Absolutely terrifying,’ he says. ‘It’s highly likely it would make it worse.’

I want to put this directly to Dr Valerie Sinason. So a week later, I return to her Golders Green sofa. I tell her, for the first time, that I am investigating Carole Myers.

‘Ha ha,’ she says. ‘Ha ha.’ There is a silence. ‘This is very helpful because you’re now truthfully admitting where your position is.’

I ask if Carole was the ‘first patient’ she had described, with the
limp. She denies it. Despite what it says in the medical records, she insists that she never treated Carole, admitting only to having seen her as part of a study into ritual abuse for the Department of Health. ‘There is so much I could say about Carole,’ she tells me. ‘But it’s totally against any ethical code to speak about patients.’

‘Talking generally, then – why do you believe your patients are telling the truth, and are not delusional?’