Two troubled women, both sought help from some of the top doctors in the country.
The diagnosis, satanic ritual abuse.
It was like going deeper and deeper into an abyss.
After millions of dollars in treatment, the women now say the doctors were wrong.
It stopped because I stopped following Dr. Braun's orders.
Tonight on Frontline, the search for Satan.
Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
And by annual financial support from viewers like you.
This is Frontline.
When I look back, I can't believe it ever happened to me.
Mary S. spent three years in psychiatric wards, diagnosed as a victim of satanic ritual abuse.
You and Bobby ruined it.
I was told that I was raised in a satanic cult.
And when you're raised in a satanic cult, you abuse people, even the people that you
love.
Everybody around you is in the cult.
You know what it is to be a person, but you don't even know that I'm smart enough to
love your daughter and get her out of the cult.
It was like going deeper and deeper and deeper into an abyss.
There was no end.
There was like a bottomless pit of horrors.
I really believed that I would either end up in a psych unit for the rest of my life,
or that when my insurance ran out, that I would live underneath a bridge as a bag woman.
Mary's journey, paid for by her insurance company, took her into one of the most controversial
areas in modern psychiatry.
It began six years ago, when Mary lived with her husband Joe and her eight-year-old son
Ryan in the suburbs of Chicago.
He worked in telecommunications.
She was a school teacher.
They were the typical loving family.
Meredith Schreiner and her husband were close friends with Joe and Mary.
They were very good friends as well as lovers, and they were very close.
They had a good relationship.
She also had a wonderful relationship with her child.
Mary was a great mom with Ryan, just a great mom, had tons of patience.
In 1988, Mary fell into a deep depression.
I started having panic attacks, not being able to eat, losing a lot of weight, not being
able to sit still, not being able to concentrate, so I went to a psychiatrist to get medication.
She found a counselor that was recommended by a friend and went to her.
Within a few months, she kept getting worse.
Anxiety attacks were very bad.
Since I had seizures and blackouts, my therapist felt that I might be suffering from dissociative
disorders, and so I went for an evaluation at the best hospital in Chicago with the leading
experts in the field.
The hospital was Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's in Chicago, a renowned teaching hospital with
a unit specializing in treating the dissociative disorder known as multiple personality disorder.
There, Mary met with Dr. Roberta Sachs.
Within the first five minutes, I was in her office.
She diagnosed me as polyfragmented multiple.
Multiplicity was something that we knew nothing about, and so she described multiplicity as
taking a vase and dropping it on a cement floor, and that's what had happened to my
personality.
It had shattered into that many pieces, and that her job as a therapist was to glue those
pieces back together into a whole.
Mary was 38 by then.
Her life had not been easy.
Growing up, she had a learning disability.
When she was 19, she was brutally date-raped, became pregnant, and gave the child up for
adoption.
After her marriage and the birth of her son, she underwent a hysterectomy and developed
seizures.
Her husband was a recovering alcoholic.
Finally, shortly before the onset of her depression, she was attacked in a hallway at the school
where she taught.
Still, Mary says, her therapist, who had attended a seminar on satanic cult abuse, thought that
that might be another explanation for her depression.
Mary wondered.
She went to church.
It is my opinion that history will mark April of 1989 as the month when Americans were forced
to pull their heads out of the sand.
There's a very large church in our area, and during the time that Mary was trying to find
herself through counseling and find out why she was having anxiety attacks, they were
having a series on cults in this church, a series meaning eight, nine weeks of sermons
on that.
In April of 1989, Satanism came out of the closet for everyone to see it in all of its
ugliness.
The Satan worshippers that pose the greatest threat to our society are the secret splinter
groups.
Cores of clandestine groups are meeting right here in our neighborhood, and the amount of
activity is on the rapid increase.
Several churches in our immediate area have been broken into recently.
Even though it was bizarre, it seemed to be an answer for her as to why she was anxious
and why she was scared and why she was nervous.
It was not a new idea.
Ten years before, the best seller, Michelle Remembers, told the story of a young woman
who had traced the source of her unhappiness to repressed memories of being satanically
abused by her family.
Soon, newspapers and magazines were full of stories of abuse at the hands of satanic cults,
stories involving cannibalism, human sacrifice, blood rituals.
The abuse was so terrible, some therapists said, that it caused children to develop multiple
personalities as a defense against the pain.
Then television joined in.
By 1988, when Geraldo Rivera's highly rated special on Satanism was broadcast, satanic
ritual abuse was considered one of the leading causes of multiple personality disorder, or
MPD.
But we are certain that Satanism exists.
To some, it's a religion.
To others, it's the practice of evil in the devil's name.
Geraldo invited experts in MPD who firmly believed that many of their patients were
survivors of satanic cults.
Here in Chicago, a group of well-known therapists from all over the country had the courage
to share horror stories.
We're talking about people in some cases who are coming to us as patients who were raised
in satanic cults from the time they were born.
I have letters in my file from over 40 states in the United States and several provinces
of Canada and one from England with very similar data.
If just a tiny bit of it is true, it's appalling and there's a need for somebody to do something.
Part of the power of the cult, both with the individual and with the others around it,
is its ability to induce fear.
Dr. Bennett Braun became a leading spokesman on the connection between MPD and ritual abuse.
It was to Dr. Braun and his colleague Roberta Sachs of Chicago that Mary had turned for
diagnosis and treatment.
Mary's reasons for admission, according to her hospital records, read, patient is a victim
of satanic ritualistic abuse, diagnosis of MPD.
Mary's vague fears of having been abused in a cult now receive the stamp of professional
certainty.
She was surprised to discover, she said, that her doctors seemed to know more about her
family's history than she did.
Roberta Sachs came in and told me that victims throughout the country had identified me as
a fifth generation cult, that we were high up in the cult, that we were cult royalty.
My family, my parents, my sisters, and I.
Once hospitalized, Mary began regular therapy sessions with Dr. Braun and Roberta or Bobby
Sachs.
Most of the sessions were about memory.
And many of the sessions were with my husband, Joe.
He would come to the sessions and the two of us would sit down and they would ask questions
about who we knew from church, who was in the people in the school district, what I
knew about their personal life, who we socialized with, trying to get more and more information
about the cult.
It felt like an investigation, and in fact, often times I would say to Bobby, all you
want is information from me, and she'd say, no, you know, we're concerned for you to
get better, but if I didn't have any information, they didn't have any time for me, especially
Dr. Braun.
Dr. Braun prescribed the medication.
He put Mary on a variety of medications, among them Halcyon, Clonopin, Xanax, Prozac, and
on experimentally high doses of the heart medication Inderol.
Heavily medicated, Mary says she lived in fear.
They told me that I had already been programmed, that if I divulged the secrets from the cult,
that I would self-destruct, and that my programming had just been turned on at age 39.
How did they know that?
Because they were the experts.
They were experts.
They said, we've been studying this for 15 years, we've done research, you know, this
phenomenon is happening all over the world, we're the experts, we've written books, we
give lectures, people come to our hospital, other doctors come to our hospital and are
trained by us because we are the experts.
In fact, Mary's doctors were considered leading experts in their field.
In November of 1994, Dr. Brown was honored at the annual conference of the International
Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation.
Most of the big names in the field were there.
Gloria Steinem was keynote speaker and guest of honor.
The burden for keeping all of this afloat was Dr. Brown's absolutely far beyond the
contribution of anybody else in the field of the society.
I want to assure everybody that Russia intends to continue its commitment to ongoing professional
education in the field of dissociation.
It was because of her doctor's reputations, Mary says, that she persevered in her treatment,
despite her fears and her growing misgivings.
I had doubts all along the way.
My journal is just full of statements, you know, this can't be true, this is a nightmare,
I've made this up, I mean, my whole life, my whole world had been turned upside down
at that point.
Here, you know, I go from being this teacher and having a normal life and doing normal
things to a cult royalty.
In an educational video, Dr. Sachs explained, very few patients who have been ritually abused
come in and say, I've been ritually abused, you know, and I've been through this torture
and that torture and I've been pregnant this many times and aborted this many times and
forced to participate in cannibalism and on and on and on.
On the contrary, these people do everything they can to deny the existence of that.
Dr. Sachs explained in her records what was wrong with Mary.
Mary had an estimated 15 developed child alters, some with twins and a system with seven cult
alters, but was unaware of their existence.
Mary was encouraged to cut off contact with most family members and friends outside the
hospital.
Meredith had not seen her friend in months.
She was lost to us totally.
We had no idea where she was.
She contacted Mary's husband, Joe.
I asked if we could visit her and he said no.
And I said, well, how about if I can call her, send her a card, whatever, he said no,
you may have no contact with her at all.
None of her friends could have contact.
We couldn't talk to her, she couldn't talk to us.
This was the doctor's orders and that's the way it was going to be.
Mary was cut off.
I had no way to test my reality.
There were a lot of nurses and things that I went to and I said, you know, is this reality?
And they all reinforced, yes, it was, you know, that I was really in the best of care
and that, you know, this was such a new field.
We were always being told we were the pioneers, we were on the cutting edge of this field
and that what they were doing with us would shape the treatment of MPDs in future generations.
Full personality disorder, we've all seen it dramatized on television.
Even though it was controversial, Dr. Braun's work was considered to be on the cutting edge
of treatment for MPD.
Just one facility devoted solely to its treatment and as Channel 5's Rick Salinger reports,
it's here in Chicago.
Rick?
Ron and Carol, it's located in that canyon of condominiums along Sheridan Road north
of Hollywood.
Dr. Bennett Brown founded the Dissociative Disorders Unit one year ago as part of Rush
Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center.
Meet Pat.
I'm 32.
I'm married.
I have two children.
By outward appearances, she is normal, but inside are dozens of different people.
Where would Pat be without this unit?
I wouldn't be alive, chances are my children and husband wouldn't be alive either.
Pat Burgess was one of the first patients on the unit in 1986.
She arrived after having been in a depression for three years following the difficult birth
of her second son.
When a social worker diagnosed her with MPD, she sought help at Rush.
These were the experts.
They were in a very well-respected teaching institution.
I turned to that teaching institution for state-of-the-art medical care, cutting-edge
medical care.
I didn't turn to them for fringe therapy, some goofy, controversial crap.
What do you hear her say?
That the hurting is over.
Dr. Brown often treated me like his star patient.
I would have to teach other residents and doctors and media people about multiple personality
disorder.
Who's there?
Sarah.
How old are you, Sarah?
Four or five.
I was supposed to switch personalities for the camera.
Who's this?
Karen.
Karen, you don't seem too happy.
I'm not.
Dr. Brown and I kind of rehearsed that a few times to make sure that it looked believable
for the interviewer.
I was supposed to talk about how if it wasn't for Dr. Brown, I wouldn't be alive.
Where would Pat be without this unit?
I wouldn't be alive.
Patty says that Dr. Brown both pushed her to remember things that didn't occur and
then believed her stories.
After a year in the hospital, Patty traced the satanic history of her family back to
the 17th century.
Satanic cult practices have been passed down through the paternal side of the family.
Dr. Brown asked me to write up something to do a presentation at his conference.
It was supposed to be one of my alter personalities giving a history about the cult.
The satanic activity has been genealogically traced to a southern Slavic region of Europe
during the Middle Evil Ages when her forbearers were the supreme monarchs of the blood royal.
I believed that I was a satanic high priestess, that I was controlling a satanic cult in a
nine state region.
I took it deadly serious.
...satanic worship, torturous human sacrifice, cannibalism and brain warships.
I think all reality and fantasy just blended together.
I was drugged, I was hypnotized, and I was mentally ill.
But I was told that until I hit bottom, until I dug all of this stuff out, I would never
get better and I would never have a chance for any kind of a future for my children.
Mary says she too was told she had to persevere in her treatment for the sake of her son.
I was told that I was the only one in five generations who was given the insight to break
this cycle.
And if I wanted my son to live and not become a cultist or to die, then I was responsible
for his life.
A turning point in Mary's treatment came when Dr. Sacks asked her to attend a consultation
with one of the most important experts in cult programming techniques, Dr. Corey Hammond,
professor of medicine at the University of Utah.
Dr. Hammond lectured often on the origins and practices of the cult.
...use a very, very systematic brainwashing that comes out of experimentation from Nazi
doctors and experimentation in the intelligence community with mind control research and involves
medical technology and is very, very sophisticated.
In one of his lectures, not available to the public, Hammond described his theories about
the origins of satanic cult programming, starting with a Jewish collaborator in the Nazi death
camps.
His name was Greenbaum, alias Dr. Green.
Some of the people then doing the mind control research were Satanists, the Nazi doctors,
and they have used all the technology.
And in fact, the kid who came over whose name was Greenbaum changed his name and Americanized
it to Green and got an M.D. in the state of New York and became known as Dr. Green.
And he's at the center of this process, and it's still around, it's around mid-60s and
still alive.
According to Dr. Hammond, Dr. Green developed a secret code based on the Greek alphabet,
which the cult used to program its members.
Examples.
Alpha represented general programming.
Beta was sexual programming.
Delta was the program for killing.
Gamma was the one that therapists should look out for.
It was a deception program, teaching misinformation and trickery.
Dr. Hammond evaluated Mary.
Is there any part of Mary who knows anything about alpha, beta, delta, or theta?
He hypnotized me and put me in trance, and then he asked me about the Greek alphabet
and asked me to name any of the Greek letters of the alphabet that I knew, and I named a
few, and then he asked me for the gamma erasure code, and I didn't know what he was talking
about.
Mary remembers being told that her gamma program was still active.
That meant she was still loyal to the cult, and possibly a danger to the staff and other
patients.
But I believe that quite a few of them that we're treating are still involved in cults,
and that we should not be treating them if they are.
And that's a cruel, terrible thing to say, and that is a danger to them and a danger
to us.
Mary says that she was told that besides being a cult plant and a spy, she was now strongly
suspected of having ritually abused and programmed her son.
He had to be evaluated.
She had to be deprogrammed.
Dr. Sacks recommended that the work be done in Houston by her colleague, Dr. Judith Peterson.
Hi, Judy.
Hi.
It's good to see you today.
The two therapists referred patients to each other, and had collaborated on several training
programs.
What you're about to see is a role play of an ab reaction that...
Peterson, a licensed psychologist and Ph.D., was clinical director of a special unit at
Spring Shadows Glenn, a private psychiatric hospital in Houston, Texas.
A small building surrounded by trees, the hospital was nicknamed Club Med by its patients.
Mary would stay there for two years.
Some of her therapy sessions were taped.
In this session, Dr. Peterson is to Mary's right.
By the time I got down to Houston, they didn't care what had happened to me.
I was identified as a perpetrator and treated as a perpetrator.
They told me that there was someone, some cult altar, deep within my system that knew
the plan about killing my husband and my son, and that all I needed to do was to let
that altar surface.
By then, Mary says, she believed it all and tried hard to provide some useful information.
They would say, you know, let them come up, bring them up.
Let the real cult loyal altars come up and give this plan.
I was told that I would go to prison because they knew that I had killed people and that
I had abused these children and I was part of this international network.
Mary's friends had no idea what had happened to her.
I was very concerned at that time that maybe she was dead.
I knew she'd call.
We were close friends.
I knew she would call, some way, somehow she would call if she could.
And by that point, I was really beating it out what was going on with her and with Joe.
And I was just very scared.
Mary's husband, Joe, who was working with her doctors, had been persuaded that his wife
was indeed in a cult that was intent on killing him and that Mary's altar personalities had
abused their son.
He's been so screwed up by the cult that he has to have professional help to know what
it is to be a little boy.
With program after program, it's got him so confused and he doesn't know what it means
to be a normal boy.
He's working hard to find out what it means to be a normal boy.
Ryan was admitted to the same hospital as his mother, where he was being evaluated for
multiple personality disorder and cult abuse.
Although he stayed on the unit right next door to her, mother and son were kept apart.
Sally McDonald was a nurse on the children's ward.
I knew Ryan as a patient on the children's unit, and he came in as a very normal little
boy who was full of joy, full of activity, very normal, talented little kid.
Ryan was one of several children at Spring Shadows who were diagnosed with multiple personality
disorder as a result of ritual abuse.
These children came into the hospital as really stable, well-functioning kids.
Most of them were admitted with absolutely no idea of why they were there.
An example of that is a 13-year-old who was admitted on her 13th birthday, and she was
told that that was the date that she would be initiated into a satanic cult, and by admitting
her to the hospital, they were protecting her.
This nurse asked not to be identified.
But I saw children being admitted with very normal behaviors, being allegedly involved
in a cult, not knowing anything about the cult, and then slowly over time being told
about that they had parts, and they had to look within themselves to find these parts
of them, and there was a lot of pressure on them.
They went into therapy sessions to identify these parts of them, which eventually became
alters, which eventually had names and became part of the multiple personality.
Was she supposedly a member of a cult?
She reported that.
Dr. Peterson supervised the treatment of nearly all the MPD patients in the hospital.
Eventually, most of her treatment techniques would be questioned, among them her alleged
practice of restraining patients at nine points on their body for hours and sometimes days.
Restraints are a very serious form of treatment to protect a patient, and yet these patients
were often kept in restraints for long periods of time, sometimes to satisfy information
gathering of Dr. Peterson.
She sought to bring out different alters while this patient was tied down, and unless these
patients produced these alters, those patients stayed in restraints for eight to 16 hours
at a time.
The nursing staff was torn and dismayed.
We were truly in the middle of an ethical dilemma.
There was a lot of hostility from the psychologist and the psychiatrist.
There was also a lot of discussion about the nurses, that the reason there was such a conflict
was because the nurses just couldn't, quote, understand what was going on.
So the belief was that if they just educated us more, we would understand everything.
Dr. Peterson wrote in a letter to the administrator of the hospital, no education can occur
with nurses who still live in the dark ages.
It became very clear to the nurses that if we objected, there would be a reprisal, and
that reprisal would be a transfer off the unit, a demotion, in some cases an actual
termination, and that created a very chilling effect.
People were afraid to object, and yet they knew, these nurses knew they had to object
because they feared violating their nurse practice act.
I didn't feel that I could really live with myself, and the kinds of things that I was
seeing happen to these children, I felt like these children were being robbed of their
childhood.
Dr. Peterson filed a child abuse report against Mary with the Department of Child and Family
Services in Illinois, citing that Mary had reported electro-shocking her son, and abusing
him in different places around the country.
As for Ryan, Dr. Peterson wrote, Ryan is felt to be a youngster who is highly programmed
as a structured polyfragmented MPD, who has programs for suicide, homicide, and return
to the cult.
Ryan was ten years old at the time.
I didn't see him the last few days before he left, but I recently found out that after
he had left, he had gone on to a facility for multiple personalities, and that was very
disheartening to me to hear that story.
I was very shocked that I thought he had left the hospital because he was one of the lucky
ones that had escaped.
The facility Dr. Peterson referred Ryan to was back in Chicago, next door to the Rush
Hospital complex, where his mother had first been hospitalized.
Ryan was not the only child to be treated for multiple personality disorder and cult-related
abuse.
Patty Burgess's two sons, Mikey and John, had spent almost three years under Dr. Braun's
care at Rush.
The children were put in the hospital because I was told that multiple personality disorder
had a genetic predisposition to it, and that the children would definitely develop multiple
personality disorder, and by having them in a teaching hospital, they could watch this
develop and catch it and treat the children right away for it.
John was hospitalized first, at the age of five, and was quickly diagnosed with multiple
personality disorder.
Maureen Gannon was the state-required teacher on the children's ward.
She spent several hours with John every day.
They said John was MPD.
Right.
They said John was in a multiple personality, that he had a multiple personality disorder.
Did you see that?
No, I did not see that, but I felt that that was a lack of my own training.
I wasn't trained as a psychiatrist, and when they would talk about the various personalities
and the subtle differences of them, I did not see those.
I couldn't have told you the difference.
I could not have pointed out and said, this was this personality, and this was that personality
at any time.
He seemed the same, basically, to you.
Seemed like a kid.
Patty's younger son, Mikey, was hospitalized seven months after his brother.
Dr. Braun became very concerned about the first Halloween coming up, 1986, and he told
us that unless Mikey was in the hospital, he was in mortal danger.
Mikey was then admitted to the hospital on an emergency basis.
He was four years old.
Patty and her children, who were housed in different parts of the hospital, got together
in therapy sessions.
Patty remembers them as the sticker sessions.
I was supposed to do everything that I could do to encourage and support the children in
the telling of these yucky secrets, and the more yucky secrets they were able to tell,
the more stickers they got for that day, so the kids were real motivated to do this as
well.
Excerpts from the child psychiatrist's notes.
John talked about being threatened that someone in his family would be killed if he didn't
obey orders.
Two stickers.
And another.
John related an incident where a black woman was seized by the cult and choked to death.
Afterwards, victim was barbecued.
Three stickers.
In this California trial, where Dr. Braun testified as an expert witness, he used an
example from one of John's sticker sessions to stress the validity of satanic abuse of
children.
A young child who was just five years old talked to me about what it's like to stick
a knife in somebody's abdomen and pull it down, and how the intestines pop out, and
they just blow out, and what it smells like.
The discussion that day was surrounding John cutting open this man's stomach.
And Dr. Braun was pumping John for some details about how did this happen?
What was it like?
And John said how he took this knife, and he stuck it in this man, and how he cut it,
and cut the man, and how his stomach popped open, and how it smelled terrible.
In the description of that, having done surgery myself, I know what it's like to open the
belly.
And if the anesthesia isn't done right, and the muscle relaxant isn't done right, that's
exactly what happens.
The balls come right out through the wound.
And here's a five-year-old that can describe to me something I know something about, and
have it perfectly as far as I'm concerned.
The kids went back to the unit, and they got their stickers that day, and John got extra
stickers because he did such a good story here.
And I told Dr. Braun, I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, you know, hearing him, I know
that's not real, because I know that's a scene from a Star Wars movie.
Where Luke Skywalker cuts open this beast he was riding, and all the guts spill out,
and it smells really terrible.
And when I heard John tell it, I knew he was telling me the story from the movie.
But Dr. Braun wouldn't believe it.
Where does a five-year-old learn about this?
How many five-year-olds go in operating rooms?
Of all the members of the Burgess family, only the boys' father, Michael, was not thought
to have been involved in the cult.
What did you make of it all?
Well, as far as I can determine from what Patty had said, and what the doctors had said,
the boys were supposed to be being trained by Patty to participate in cult activities,
and then at some future date take over, I guess, a leadership role in this cult.
When did they first get into the cult?
Shortly after birth, they were supposedly been trained, even as small infants, to do
these kinds of satanic rituals, to do the murders, to kill other children.
They were supposed to have been trained to do all that.
But how could that have happened if you didn't know about it?
That's what had me confused.
As things started getting into a regular routine of every week, every day, there was a new
Mary coming up.
After my initial shock and horror and really fear, because I was afraid for my family's
life, it became more and more difficult to believe all the stuff that had happened.
Did you ever ask Dr. Braun where the bodies were, why there was no evidence?
Of course, those were the questions.
Why aren't you doing something about this?
How come the police aren't being involved in this?
The answer, of course, was that they were gathering evidence to be able to crack into
this very secretive and dangerous cult, and that people had gone into it undercover and
had been killed or had been actually drawn into the cult themselves, and that they were
gathering evidence so that they could do something about it.
The reason why it was never uncovered was because these people ate the evidence, so
that there wasn't any evidence, and that there were doctors involved with this, so
that there were cover-ups as far as medical findings and things, so there were always
answers for every question that everybody had that seemed reasonable.
The Burgess children were hospitalized for almost three years.
Our five-year-old John, who went in, was there for 39 months, and Mikey was brought into
the hospital at four years old, and he was kept on a children's psychiatric unit for
32 months.
From the time I entered the hospital until we got the children out of the hospital by
court order, it was 1,200 days.
And how much money?
We each had $1 million insurance policy that was almost completely topped out, so we're
looking at $3 million.
This is a partial list of the Burgess family's hospital bills.
Their bill for medication alone was in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Hospital room and board was well over a million dollars.
Mary's hospital bills also amounted to millions of dollars.
The rough estimate of just adding up what hospital bills we do have and therapy bills
that we do have, it's over $2.5 million.
Did you pay it?
My insurance company paid out that amount of money.
The cost of Mary's care at Spring Shadows Glen averaged $1,200 a day.
According to the staff, this was not unusual.
The unit was very profitable because it was billed at an intensive care rate rather than
the normal rate on another unit.
And these patients stayed for long periods of time.
Dr. Jack Leggett is a clinical psychologist who used to review mental health claims for
insurance companies around the country.
Beginning in the late 1980s, he noticed a startling pattern in the claims involving
MPD patients.
Most of them had generous insurance policies.
The focus was generally on patients with very rich benefits plans, and I would find in some
cases that large numbers of people from single employers with those types of plans would
suddenly be presenting with this diagnosis, an incidence of multiple personality way beyond
anything reasonable that could be expected for a given population of individuals.
So there was a targeting of the richer benefits plans.
Dr. Leggett discovered that questioning the bills of MPD patients could have unpleasant
consequences.
I was met with the most hostile responses that I came across in all the years I had
done any kind of case management or clinical supervision, beginning with discounting the
credibility of myself and the board-certified experienced psychiatrists and psychologists
that I used, extending on to rather strange suggestions at times that I might be somehow
related to these satanic cults or the organizations I worked for.
Hospital staff also felt threatened.
If you resisted the psychologist and the psychiatrist, you might be labeled as one of the cult.
And that happened to some people, that they were considered, quote, cult members.
And so you never quite knew when you might get labeled for that, too.
It was kind of like a witch hunt.
According to Dr. Leggett, a lot of money was being spent while the patients were not getting
any better.
There's sort of a cliché, you have to get worse before you get better.
The problem was, people got worse without getting better.
Mary was getting much worse.
It was a snake pit, it was like hell.
I was sure that I would die there sooner or later, and probably sooner.
Somehow I had just gotten lost, and no one out there will even know that I'm gone.
Mary had been in Houston for two years when her insurance company began to push for a
change in status.
She was to be moved permanently to a nursing home.
Somehow, she says, she gathered enough strength to resist.
I wasn't going.
I refused to go.
I decided that I had nothing to lose.
I had lost everything, everything.
I decided I just wanted to leave and take my chances.
According to Mary, the hospital agreed to release her on the condition that she get
herself a sophisticated security system to protect her from the cult, and that she find
a therapist on the outside.
The doctor that I was released to, I continued to go to therapy with him, and it wasn't
very long before he said on my second visit, he said, do you like being multiple?
And I said, no, I hate it.
It's awful.
I'm really working to integrate all these parts, and he says, you don't have to be
multiple anymore.
You can just stop.
Just stop.
Stop working.
Stop thinking about it.
We'll just work on getting you physically healthy, because I was in awful, awful physical
health, and getting you off this medication, because I had to go through all the withdrawal.
And he said, that's enough.
We don't need to work on your personalities.
You don't have to be multiple anymore.
And when I stopped working on it, it dissipated.
The memories started to stop.
I found out that I could go outside my apartment, and no one, I never got shot at.
I could go to the grocery store, I never got poisoned.
I could make telephone calls.
I wasn't being taped.
Nothing was happening.
It stopped, because I stopped following Dr. Braun's orders.
I stopped taking the medication, and I stopped being involved in the hypnosis.
And when my head started to clear after detoxing off of all of that medicine, and my critical
thinking skills started to return, the switching stopped.
All these goofy things that were going on weren't happening anymore.
And I was able to finally take a look at this, and say, you know, wait a minute.
Where are all these bodies?
Where are all these people that are supposed to be involved in this cult?
It took months and a court order to get the hospital to release Patty's two sons, who
the child psychiatrist claimed needed long-term institutionalization.
Today, John is 15, and Mikey 13.
They're young boys, they're starting to go through puberty.
How is this going to affect them?
John now is just mainstreaming into a regular junior high school.
Mikey still goes to a special school.
It's just had a very large impact.
It's like there's been a hole in their life in the normal period of growing up.
It's like a large chunk has just taken them and is missing.
Mary was not as lucky as the Burgas family, who ended up together.
When she got out of the hospital in Texas and returned home to Chicago, she found her
husband and son, who had been in treatment with Dr. Sachs, still believed that she was
a member of a cult and intent on killing them.
She was still listed with the state of Illinois as a child abuser.
Her husband had filed for divorce.
There's an emptiness, there's a void that I'll never be able to fill.
And until they stop the therapy with Dr. Sachs, they won't be able to get out of this mindset.
In April of 1995, Mary met with Ryan and Joe at a court-appointed psychiatrist's office.
She had not seen her son in four years.
He was reluctant to talk to her and did not want to see her again.
In the end, the psychiatrist, Dr. Alan Rabitz, produced a report for the court.
It reads, I am of the firm opinion that Mary's initial difficulties were not a manifestation
of multiple personality disorders secondary to ritualistic abuse.
Nevertheless, Joe and Ryan continue to believe the cult abuse explanation.
Both of them have placed their trust in mental health professionals who genuinely believe
that Mary was both a victim and a perpetrator of this abuse.
Continued treatment with the current mental health treatment team, even if issues of abuse
are not addressed, covertly perpetuates the belief system that has destroyed this family.
Are they evil?
I don't know how anyone could know what is known now and see what it has done to families.
My family was not the first family.
This had been going on for 15 years.
And I now know of stories almost exactly like my story that were 10 years before this under
the same doctors in the same hospitals.
So they knew what was going on and they still continue to do it.
Were they evil?
I think that's pretty evil.
The dissociative disorders unit at Spring Shadows Glenn Hospital was shut down by the
state in 1992.
Judith Peterson still sees patients in private practice.
She is being sued by 10 former patients, including Mary S. Frontline asked Dr. Peterson for an
interview, but in an exchange of letters with her lawyer, could not agree to the conditions
she requested.
The history of these meetings.
Dr. Bennett Braun and Dr. Roberta Sachs declined to be interviewed for this program.
They are still heading their dissociative disorders unit at Rush Hospital in Chicago,
which remains one of the leading centers for the treatment of multiple personality disorder.
They have been sued by several of their former patients, the Burgess family and Mary S. among
them.
After seven years investigating claims of ritual abuse, the FBI concluded there is little
or no evidence for allegations that deal with large scale baby breeding, human sacrifice
and organized satanic conspiracies.
It is up to mental health professionals, not law enforcement, to explain why victims are
alleging things that don't seem to have happened.
You can interact with Frontline by sending your comments by fax to 617-254-0243 via the
internet at frontline at wgbh.org, and by letter to Dear Frontline, 125 Western Avenue,
Boston, Massachusetts 02134.
And next time.
Why is corporate America spending billions of dollars in cyberspace?
Welcome.
Why, to find out everything they can about you.
Somewhere in your computer, you'll know the movies I've seen.
You might be listening to.
You'll know the clothes I've ordered.
They're going to know what you like.
You will know more about me than even the government.
Big brother watching over us.
Then maybe even my wife.
That's a little scary.
Watch High Stakes in Cyberspace next time on Frontline.
It was a snake pit.
It was like hell.
I was sure that I would die there sooner or later, and probably sooner.
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