The Daily Mail for Thursday, February 10 and the London freesheet Metro ran reports about alleged Satanic ritual murder in some unspecified nether region of Britain. The Mail’s headline on page 33 announced Babies ‘born for sacrifice’; the Metro report bore a higher priority (appearing on page 4) and a slightly more daring headline: Children ‘abused in satanic rituals’. In view of the sensational content of this story both papers hedged their bets, sensibly, by placing the lurid allegations inside quotation marks. So what are they? According to the Mail, Scotland Yard is investigating allegations of murder and cannibalism following research into Satanic abuse funded by the Department of Health. Or perhaps that should be alleged Satanic abuse funded by the Department of Mental Health? Amazing isn’t it what difference that one word - alleged - can make?
This report is of such urgency that it is due out in the Spring, when presumably the police will decide if there is sufficient evidence to act on its revelations. The babies that are sacrificed to the Devil are said to be conceived specifically for the purpose of being tortured and killed. So who is signing their death certificates: Dr Shipman? No. No one is signing them because, according to the Mail: “Their births are not registered which, it is alleged, [that wonderful word again] makes it difficult for police to trace the culprits.”
So who is making these extraordinary claims? A woman named Valerie Sinason, whom we are informed is a “leading psychotherapist”. She bases her allegations on interviews with 76 children and adults who claim to have witnessed these appalling crimes, and to have hard evidence that such crimes were indeed perpetrated.
Which does rather make one wonder why the police are dragging their heels. After all, what if some of these babies were black? Good grief, that could mean more charges of institutional racism and another Macpherson Report. But hold your horses, one of the participants (and my guess the only one) is a 27 year old “victim” named Teresa. Now where have I heard that name before?
In 1991 a woman named Dianne Core co-authored a book with Fred Harrison which bore the lurid title CHASING SATAN “An Investigation into Satanic crimes against children”. (1) At the beginning of the book, on page 3, Mrs Core claims to have been responsible for gaoling over 60 paedophiles and to have conducted seminars at Scotland Yard, yet on the next page she claims to have been threatened with a gag. Exactly why Mrs Core was gagged and by whom is not difficult to fathom. On page 88 she asks:
HOW MANY human sacrifices take place each year, and is the very idea a credible one?
A figure that is publicised in the United States - usually by the sceptics, who use it to ridicule the believers - is 40,000. In Britain, some newspapers - again, for the purpose of ridiculing the concept of ritual abuse - have credited me with the claim that 4,000 live sacrifices are performed each year.
Hmm, that’s rather a lot, but on the following page, after some dubious arithmetic, she says that 4,000 “while not proven, is not statistically absurd”.
People who make such lurid allegations can often get away with their nonsense, unless they are foolish enough to name specific individuals, who can, if the allegations persist, resort to the civil law. Mrs Core had obviously been served with an injunction after opening her big mouth too wide. Which brings us to Teresa. On page 91 of her book, Mrs Core tells us
TERESA was a breeder. Her babies were taken from her and ceremonially sacrificed to Satan.
And
She told me of the multiple rapes; of her seven pregnancies, most of which were terminated by members of her coven, the foetuses used for cannibalistic rituals. Of how she was taken to a big house, where children were kept in cages. It was a litany of evil with which I had by now become familiar.
Stories can of course be both lurid and true. Who could forget the ghoulish American homosexual serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer? Or our own house of horrors on Cromwell Street and the thoroughly perverted and evil Fred and Rosemary West? Even Satanic murder is not unknown this century. In July of last year the 53 year old Mayor of Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe, was charged with the ritual murder of a 12 year old girl. He had supposedly intended to use her organs in tribal rites “that he allegedly believed would benefit his shopping business”. (2)
But extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof, in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer that proof was forthcoming: a refrigerator full of human heads; and in the case of the Wests, bodies were found literally all over the place. So how many corpus delicti has Mrs Core produced? Not a lot, it would appear. In the case of Teresa, according to Mrs Core herself - at page 95 of her book - when the trial finally came around at the Central Criminal Court in 1989 the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to proceed. This could be because the CPS has been infiltrated by Satanists, or it could be because for all its faults this much and rightly criticised organisation recognised both the lack of evidence of Satanic abuse and Mrs Core’s flawed methodology. For example, at page 17 of her book she cites the Spanner case as proof of Satanic abuse! (3)
The “Satan bug” has not only been hyped by irresponsible reporting but has also been exposed by journalists with some commitment to truth. In 1991 an article in the Journalist - which quoted Mrs Core - reported that the lurid stories of Satanic abuse had been imported from the United States (where else!) in 1987. (4)
It is not clear from the Metro and Daily Mail articles if Valerie Sinason is au fait with the background to the case, or if she has met Mrs Core in person, but it is encouraging to see New Scotland Yard treating these allegations with the contempt they so rightly deserve. Let us hope that before mass arrests and witchcraft hysteria break out in Britain - as happened in the United States a decade and more ago - the authorities obtain some meaningful physical evidence rather than relying on the lurid fantasies of disturbed children and deranged adults. That evidence will be a long time surfacing. For obvious reasons.
[The above article was published April 8, 2000].
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