Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

226 Robin Hood Hills Murders
recalled her own aborted fetus being ritually
dismembered. A medical exam proved that
she had never even been pregnant. No babies
had ever gone missing. Ingram was convicted,
in spite of his protestations of innocence, on
an absolute lack of evidence of his guilt and
an absence of proof that any crimes had
actually occurred.
Finally, a Rivera program on “Wrongly
Accused and Convicted of Child Molest” was aired
on CNBC on December 12, 1995. During this
program, he apologized for promoting the SRA
perspective. “I want to announce publicly that as a
firm believer of the ‘Believe the Children’ movement
of the 1980s, that started with the McMartin
trials in California, but NOW I am convinced that
I was terribly wrong ... and many innocent
people were convicted and went to prison as a
result... AND I am equally positive [that the]
‘Repressed Memory Therapy Movement’ is also a
bunch of CRAP.”
See also Manson, Charles; Crime; Ingram Ritual
Abuse Case; Satanic Ritual Abuse
For Further Reading:
Brown, Rebecca. He Came to Set the Captives Free.
Chino, CA: Chick Publications, 1986.
O’Reilly, David. “America’s Magic Cult of
Ignorance.” San Jose Mercury News, August 8,
1993.
Robinson, Bruce A. “Geraldo Rivera’s Influence on
the Satanic Ritual Abuse and Recovered
Memory Hoaxes.”
http://www.religioustolerance.org/geraldo.htm.
Shales, Tom. “Rivera’s ‘Devil Worship’ was TV at its
Worst.” San Jose Mercury News, October 31,
1988.
Skow, John. “Can Memory be a Devilish Inventor
Time. 143, no. 20 (May 16 1994).Victor, Jeffrey.
Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary
Legend. Chicago: Open Court, 1993.
Wielawski, Irene. “Victims of Memory” Los Angeles
Times. October 7, 1991.
Robin Hood Hills Murders
The Robin Hood Hills murders took place on May
5, 1993, near West Memphis, Arkansas. Three
eight-year-old boys were tied up, abused,
murdered, and mutilated. The bodies were found
the next day in a drainage ditch paralleling the
Damien Echols during the trial (The Commercial Appeal)
interstate highway, where the water washed away
fingerprints and any other identifying marks.
Beginning in the early 1980s, numerous law
enforcement officials had attended conferences on
Satanic ritual abuse (SRA), where they had been
taught that a covert, international network of
Satanic cults routinely abduct, abuse, and murder
children in their diabolical rituals. By 1993,
however, police departments across the country
had become increasingly skeptical. In the face of a
lack of hard evidence, most law enforcement agencies
had concluded that SRA was a nonexistent
hoax. Belief in ritual abuse nevertheless persisted
among certain segments of the conservative
Christian subculture, including among some
policemen.
A juvenile probation officer at the Robin Hood
Hills crime scene hypothesized that the boys had
been murdered in a Satanic ritual. He believed that
the one person in the area who might be capable
of the crime was a young man whose case he had
followed for years, Damien Echols. From that
point onwards, police focused on proving that
Echols was the high priest of a Satanic cult. If this
could be demonstrated to the satisfaction of a jury,