Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [43]
A local TV station took the story one step further, proposing that the preschool might be linked to child porn rings in nearby Los Angeles. Only later did it surface that the mother of the alleged victim was an alleged alcoholic and had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
During that same period, allegations of ritualistic abuse were lodged against employees of the Presidio Child Development Center, a day care center run by the U.S. Army in San Francisco. Parents charged that a satanic cult was operating out of the center and systematically victimizing the young student body. Reports that children had been transported to private homes, where they were forced to engage in satanic and sadistic sexual acts, led to a police investigation.
With these allegations rampant, Susan and Felix began to subscribe to the hysteria, believing the worst about the people who cared for Adam. Felix, perhaps because of his personal and professional backgrounds, was acutely vulnerable to the spreading paranoia. Taking matters into his own hands, Felix authored a report entitled Reflections on Psychology, describing these cults as “very sophisticated” and claiming that “some were set up by the CIA as a way to learn/teach mind control.” In Adam’s case, Felix alleged that the perpetrators were “homosexual cultists” who had “sodomized and filmed” the boy during his hours in day care.
Using the paper as a catalyst, he took his views to the Fourth Annual Two-Day Conference of the California Consortium of Child Abuse Counsels in Berkeley in 1988, where he outlined the alleged abuse. Felix was one of two speakers to address the audience that day. The first was a woman who claimed to have been a survivor of ritualistic child abuse at the hands of cultists, some of whom she described as family members. Interestingly, she was also a patient of Dr. Polk’s who was treating her for the trauma.
Felix asked that he be introduced not as a therapist but as a “parent of a ritualistically abused child,” although he provided the audience with an overview of his credentials during the twenty-five minute address. Displaying a piece of paper he held in his hand, Felix explained that he was going to read aloud a letter that his not-quite five-year-old son had written to the governor of California.
“I want you to get the bad people because I hate them,” Felix began in a deliberate monotone. “I want to punch them and my daddy wants to punch them…. And my mommy can bite them, and that’s all she can do…. And my brother Eli can throw a truck at them.”
To shock the audience, he detailed the abuse his son had allegedly suffered during his time at the day care center. “He was taken from the house in what he called a school bus,” he recited. “Other children were picked up along the way.” They were taken to what “sounds like a warehouse, with a cement floor…. It had cages, and a stage, people dressed in red triangular masks, professional cameras like on TV sets. There were performers. He and other children were raped on stage in every form. Children were killed.”
Felix said that Adam’s most troubling recollection was that of a “baby put in a plastic bag and hammered to death.”
According to Felix, the youngster also claimed to have witnessed “other ceremonies” in which adults and children drank blood and urine and ate feces and a “bloody substance” that he believed was flesh from bowls. Some of the children were black, and others might have been mentally retarded, he contended.
He next insisted