Multiple Personalities and Satanic Cults

By Mark Pendergrast

    Mark Pendergrast kindly posts this excerpt from the second 
    edition of his book,

                          VICTIMS OF MEMORY
                        (Upper Access, 1996)

                          From the chapter,
             "Multiple Personalities and Satanic Cults."

           [Among the 5 recently indicted in Houston were 
           Judith Peterson, Ph.D. and Richard Seward, M.D.]

  Another alarming example of MPD treatment in Texas was revealed in a
recent article by Sally McDonald in the Journal of Psychosocial
Nursing. Psychiatric nurse McDonald discusses how MPD specialist
Judith Peterson, called "Dr. M." in the article, came to Houston's
Spring Shadows Glen Hospital in 1990 to head the new dissociative
disorders unit. McDonald's article makes startling assertions.
Completely supported by new medical director Dr. Richard Seward, and
by the hospital administration -- because her patients brought in
$15,600 a day -- Peterson instituted a virtual reign of terror on the
ward, according to McDonald. Peterson subscribed to Bennett Braun's
methodology, hypnotizing patients and convincing them to relive
supposedly forgotten traumas. She believed that virtually every
patient harbored multiple personalities formed during satanic cult
abuse. "One young patient was placed in nine-point mechanical
restraints for three days, " McDonald writes, "not because he was a
threat to himself or others . . . but because those three days
coincided with some satanic event."

  Twelve nurses fled the unit within a year and a half, but no one
dared confront Dr. Peterson directly until she diagnosed a "bright,
articulate, preadolescent" girl, an honors student, as having been
involved in a satanic cult. Confined to one room, the girl was denied
access to her parents. In weekly staff meetings, nurses begged for a
less restrictive environment, asking that the child be given "freedom
of movement, peer interaction, fresh air, exercise, and a bed to sleep
in," but Peterson refused. The girl became pale, thin, and dispirited.
"These nurses knew they were the only advocates this girl had,"
McDonald writes. "Alone she was unable to object to what her doctor
and therapist thought `best' for her."

  When insurance companies began to question why it was only Peterson
and Seward who ever recorded "altered states" or "violent behavior" on
the patients' charts, the nurses were pressured to write up such
behavior, McDonald asserts, even though they had never observed it.
Nurses were intimidated, constantly written up for non-existent
violations. Peterson "threatened lawsuits so frequently that the
nurses were afraid to counter her demands; they spoke in whispers in
hallways because she taped their conversations." When the nurse
manager sat in on "abreactive sessions," she was horrified by the
"coercive, leading nature of these therapy sessions."

  Mothers who had hypnotic memories of cult involvement were coerced
into getting divorced and giving up their children, McDonald
writes. "Nurses advised these distraught couples to seek legal
counsel, especially before signing divorce papers, but the patients
were too fragile to pursue outside opinions, and too frightened of
incurring the wrath of their therapist, Dr. M. They believed [as she
told them in sessions under hypnosis] that she was the expert, and
only she could successfully cure them."

  In a 1993 Houston Chronicle article, journalist Mark Smith quoted
several former patients who are suing Judith Peterson. Lucy Abney, 45,
who sought treatment for depression, spent nearly a year (and over
$300,000) at Spring Shadows Glen and came out with more than 100
alters and vivid memories of ritual abuse. Her two daughters are in
state custody. As an example of the paranoia rampant on the hospital
ward, Abney described how her husband was turned away when he tried to
give her a carnation. Patients were warned that items such as flowers
could trigger alter personalities.

  According to several former patients and nurses, Judith Peterson
specialized in convincing mothers that they had abused their children,
who were also supposedly cult members. Then the children would also be
admitted to the hospital. In an anonymous interview, a former nurse on
the dissociative disorders unit told me that five families entered the
hospital in this manner. Of those, three mothers ended up divorced and
losing all contact with their children.

  Kathryn Schwiderski and her three children were all patients of
Judith Peterson at another Houston hospital and came to believe that
their entire family had taken part in a satanic cult. Their collective
therapy and hospitalization cost over $2 million. In a 1990
presentation at a national MPD conference, Peterson described a family
suspiciously similar to the Schwiderskis (without using their names),
including details about "human sacrifice, cannibalism, black hole,
shock to create alters (other personalities), marriage to Satan,
buried alive, birth of Satan's child, internal booby traps, forced
impregnation, and sacrifice of own child." While most of the family
members no longer believe in these "memories," 22-year-old Kelly
Schwiderski remains convinced that she killed three babies in a "fetus
factory" in Colorado.

  I interviewed one of Judith Peterson's former patients, who verified
much of what McDonald and Smith wrote. Because she insisted on
anonymity out of fear that Peterson will sue her I will call her
Angela. During her private sessions with Peterson, Angela found her
"charming, even bewitching. She had an air about her of insight and
caring. In my first session, she was all ears and supportive emotion.
It felt good to have someone who was so attentive to every word that I
spoke, every movement that I made." Soon Peterson convinced Angela
that she should enter the hospital, where she could see her more
often.

  Once admitted, Angela says she couldn't get out. Peterson became "a
monster -- harsh, hostile, interrogating, guilt-imputing, accusatory,"
according to Angela. The therapist and her staff tried to convince
Angela that she harbored multiple personalities and had been in a
satanic cult. She was heavily drugged. "Dr. Peterson told me my anger
came from a cult alter trying to come out, and that physical problems
I was having were body memories." Peterson's patients weren't allowed
to use the telephone unmonitored, Angela told me. Their mail was
censored. Only approved visitors were allowed, and those few were
closely watched. "If we weren't cooperative revealing new alters,
talking about Satanism or were resistant to what we were told about
ourselves or our families, we weren't considered `safe' and
often were restricted to the central lobby."

  Angela likens the treatment to attempts to break prisoners of
war. "They had a board with all the patients' names," she told me,
"and every one had an `1S' after it for suicide precaution -- not
because we were really going to kill ourselves, but because that kept
our insurance payments flowing." Finally, Angela escaped when her
insurance ran out. "At first, Dr. Peterson was like my angel from
heaven, but instead she took me to hell, and I've been struggling to
get out ever since."

  Another former patient, Mary Shanley (her real name), echoes much of
Angela's experience. As a 39-year-old first grade teacher, she entered
an inpatient unit under Bennett Braun's supervision in the Chicago
area early in 1990. She disliked Braun intensely. "He thinks he's
God," she told me, "and you'd better think so, too." But Shanley
admired Roberta Sachs, her psychologist. Under Sachs's tutelage,
Shanley came to believe that her mother had been the high priestess in
a satanic cult, and that she, Mary, was being groomed for the
position. "I remembered going to rituals and witnessing sacrifices. I
had a baby at age 13, supposedly, and that child was sacrificed. I
totally believed all of this. I would have spontaneous abreactions,
partly because I was so heavily medicated. I was on Inderal, Xanax,
Prozac, Klonopin, Halcion, and several other drugs, all at once. No
wonder I was dissociating."

  After eleven months, Shanley finally got out of the hospital for
three months. Then Roberta Sachs called her and asked if she would
consult with psychologist Corydon Hammond, who was coming to town to
give a workshop. After a hypnotic session during which Hammond tried
to get Shanley to name Greek letters and identify a Dr. Green, he
announced that she was so highly programmed and resistant that she was
not treatable. Her nine-year-old son, however, might still be saved if
he was treated in time. Otherwise, the cult would kill him. Shanley's
husband believed Hammond, and a week or two later Mary Shanley was
taken to the airport, not knowing her destination.

  She arrived in Houston in May of 1991 to enter Spring Shadows Glen
under the care of Judith Peterson. "When I first met Dr. Peterson, I
thought she had this beautiful smile, and she spoke so softly and
gently. She's tall and thin, sort of like a china doll, with a
porcelain complexion and bright red hair. She's very striking." Once
inside the hospital, however, Shanley found Peterson to be precisely
the opposite of her first impression. "She was known on the ward as
the red-headed bitch," Shanley told me. "She did not like me at all
and made no bones about it." After Shanley called a mental health
advocacy hotline to complain, she found herself accompanied "one-on-
one" for 24 hours a day by a technician. "I was locked out of my room
and kept in the central lobby. I wasn't allowed to use the telephone
or to go outside. That's when I took up smoking, so that I could at
least go outside briefly. I slept on the floor or on a couch. After I
hurt my back in abreactive sessions, they let me drag my mattress
out."

  Part of Shanley's problem was her honesty. Even though she believed
that she had been in a cult and possessed internal alters, she would
not make them up on cue to please Dr. Peterson. When she would not
perform properly during an abreactive session, she would be kept in
restraints for up to nine hours until she said what Peterson wanted to
hear. "A lot of the times, the tech and I would discuss what answer
she might want." Sometimes, the psychodramatist and another
psychiatrist would sit on either side of Shanley during sessions. "If
Dr. Peterson asked a question and I couldn't answer, they would talk
back and forth, representing my alters, literally talking over my
head."

  Most of Peterson's efforts concentrated on eliciting information
regarding Shanley's son, who was going though a similar abreactive
process back in Chicago with Roberta Sachs. Peterson would fax new
information to her colleague in Illinois. "It would work the other
way, too," Shanley says. "Dr. Peterson told me how my son acted out
how he could cut a human heart out of a living body. I thought,
there's no way he could imagine that. And I thought, he doesn't lie, I
know he's not a liar. So I believed it all."

  After over two years in Spring Shadows Glen, Mary Shanley finally
got out in 1993. She has lost her husband and child, who still believe
in the satanic cults. She has lost her home and her 20-year teaching
career. "I have absolutely nothing. I don't even have enough clothes
to wear to my work in a department store." She can't teach or hold a
federal job because she is on a list of suspected child molesters.

  There is hope, however. In 1995, Shanley's horror story was featured
in a Frontline documentary, "The Search for Satan," making it
painfully clear that she was a victim of terrible therapy. Two lawyers
Zachary Bravos of Wheaton, Illinois, and Skip Simpson of Dallas, Texas
are representing Shanley and several other patients in suits against
Judith Peterson, Roberta Sachs, Bennett Braun, and others. Because of
their willingness to take her case, Shanley feels some hope for the
future.

                             ***********                

  By the end of 1992, nurse Sally McDonald had been shifted from the
adolescent unit to another department in the hospital because she kept
calling Peterson unethical, and the head nurse of the dissociative
disorders unit had also been forced out of her position for
"insubordination." Morale on the dissociative disorders unit had sunk
to an all-time low, according to McDonald. Although nurses repeatedly
protested to hospital administrators, nothing happened. Then, in the
last week of February, 1993, Medicare officials arrived for a routine
hospital inspection. Within hours, they brought in Texas health
authorities, and on March 19, the dissociative unit was closed. Two
patients walked outside for the first time in two years. Since then,
former patients have begun to talk to the media about their
experiences, and at least seven are suing. Judith Peterson no longer
works at Spring Shadows Glen, but she has sued the hospital, McDonald,
and another nurse for slander and libel, and she plans countersuits
against several patients. She continues to practice as a private
therapist. Richard Seward now works with prisoners, but he remains on
call at the hospital.

  The charismatic Dr. Peterson has her champions, however. I
interviewed 23-year-old Christy Steck, an MPD patient who has been
seeing Peterson for four years, and who spent most of 1992 in the
dissociative disorders unit at Spring Shadows Glen. Steck has always
had stomach problems and other vague physical complaints, which she
now blames on her biological mother, since recovering memories of her
mother and grandfather abusing her in a satanic cult. Her first
flashback to ritual abuse occurred while she was watching the horror
movie, Friday the Thirteenth. With her therapist's help, Steck has
been able to identify alters named Tyrant, Tricia, Angela, Whore, and
Fucking Bitch. The last two are "real deep parts that answer to
whistles, clickers, and metronomes," Steck told me. They are the ones
programmed to be sex slaves in pornography and prostitution. She has
spots on her body that look like "just birthmarks," she said, but in
reality they are tattoos and scars from electroshock torture.

  "Dr. Peterson is so sincere and genuine, also strong-willed and
dedicated," Steck told me. "When she first met me, she shook my hand
and looked into my eyes. I saw the most caring, genuine person I've
ever met. She kept holding my hand and said she'd always be there for
me, no matter what I said." Peterson confirmed that Steck was not only
an MPD, but a special kind. While in the dissociative disorders unit,
Steck voluntarily entered restraints during abreactive sessions. "I
have violent seizures from remembering electroshock, and I have
violent alters programmed to kill whoever is hearing this. That's why
they put me in restraints. Otherwise, I would try to hurt myself or
Dr. Peterson."

  Steck calls Peterson her "savior" and insists that she has "always
given me the freedom to choose my own path." The therapist often asks
her, "Okay, do you want to go back to the cult, or do you want to
work? If you're not going to talk, why should I bother to work with
you?" Steck calls Peterson "tough but caring," and says that the
therapist has never really pressured her. "She gives people a choice
of what to believe. She never says, `believe that's what happened.'
She says, `It's up to you to figure out what happened.'"

  When Steck's insurance had almost run out, Bennett Braun flew in
from Rush Presbyterian in Chicago to evaluate her. Braun's 500-page
report, which discussed her abuse and suicide attempts in detail,
allowed the doctors to declare Steck a "catastrophic case," so that a
special rider on her insurance kicked in to continue to pay for
treatment. Later, Richard Loewenstein came from Sheppard Pratt to
confirm the diagnosis.

  Now, Christy Steck sees Judith Peterson two or three times a
week. "I'm doing better than I ever have in my whole life," she told
me. "But I can't be left alone yet. I can't really work, but I clean a
couple of houses for people I know well. They stay there while I
work. It's just a matter of working through this programming to where
I'm not accessible to the cult. The more I see that I've been
programmed and brainwashed, the more I can work with it. If I don't
see it, I won't get well." She predicts that she will need another
four years of "intensive therapy,"after which she will probably need a
weekly check-up. "I hope some day I'll be integrated."

  Finally, I interviewed Judith Peterson, and I came to understand how
all three of her patients are probably telling the truth. Peterson
denies McDonald's accusations. "The lady spelled her own name
correctly; almost everything else in that article is a lie," she told
me. She denies that any phone calls were monitored, that patients were
held against their will, that they were kept until their insurance ran
out. She points out that McDonald never worked on the dissociative
disorders unit, but only on the adolescent unit.

  As for the preadolescent girl who concerned McDonald so much,
Peterson asserts that she was a "very acute" case of MPD who tried to
crash through a plate glass door in order to escape, and who
repeatedly attacked Peterson, once with the broken shards of a compact
mirror. "Not infrequently, I've been knocked across the room by
violent alters," she told me. Yes, some patients had to be restricted
to the central lobby near the nursing station, so they could be
watched, but that was only to keep them from hurting themselves or
others.

  Peterson says that she no longer uses the term "abreactive
sessions," preferring to speak of "memory processing." Before each
session, she asks patients to write down their new memories, which may
have come through flashbacks, journaling, artwork, dreams, or body
memories. Then, after placing them in a "light hypnotic state," she
encourages them to go through each memory to "deal with the feelings
and perform cognitive restructuring."  These sessions clearly get
quite intense, with patients purportedly reliving torture and electric
shock treatment. "They have pseudo-grand mal seizures," Peterson told
me.

  She is no longer so sure that her patients were actually involved in
satanic ritual abuse cults. Rather, the ritual abuse may have been
used "as a screen and creator of terror. Underneath it, in terms of
complex alter layers, is organized crime." In other words, she
believes that criminal gangs intentionally terrified her patients,
often making them mistakenly belie ve that murders had taken place.
"They have ways of tricking people; they're given drugs, and they're
terrified and confused." The crime groups do this in order to produce
"synthetic alters" who will act in pornographic films or become
prostitutes. Other patients, she thinks, were thus treated by the Ku
Klux Klan.

  Of course, Peterson cannot tell for sure whether these memories are
accurate. "My patients tell me very bizarre stories." She simply
listens. "I'm a guide, asking `What happened next?' I don't lead
them." Yes, she has heard stories of murdered babies. "It doesn't
particularly matter if it's true or not. I wasn't there. The dilemma
of true or not true is up to them."  Of one thing she is certain,
though: "These people don't make up the terror; that's pretty hard to
do. They also don't make up the electric shocks. They have body
memories of them." That accounts for the pseudo-seizures.

  Judith Peterson, now 48, seems genuinely outraged that her integrity
has been impugned. She has always considered herself an altruistic,
idealistic person trying to help the world. She began her career
working with migrant workers and Head Start children and parents. She
considered going into the Peace Corps. She has only tried to help
those who come to her "depressed, anxious, overwhelmed." In her
workshops, she says, she even warns against the dangers of telling
patients during an initial session that they must have been sexually
abused. "Yet here I am so viciously attacked," she laments. She
explains her former patients' dissatisfaction by referring to their
mental condition."Basically, these patients are sociopathic. They have
their own reasons for targeting me," she says darkly.

  Peterson sent me a revealing article she recently published in Treat
ing Abuse Today, in which she compares her plight with that of her
abused patients, coping with "existential crises at a depth I never
thought imaginable."  She complains, "Those I tried to help
sadistically turned on the very person who reached out to help." This
article eloquently expresses Peterson's experiences and beliefs:
     
  "I've spent timeless moments, hours, days and years listening to
those with souls that were shattered. I moved from being a therapist
who thought incest was the worst thing imaginable, to hearing of
abuses so unimaginable that I walked out of therapy sessions stunned
.. . . . Sometimes I would just cry over the range and extent of human
cruelty. There are no words to express what I have felt as I have
heard people describe everything from having a broom handle stuffed up
their anus to having their teeth electrically shocked. I have listened
to a mother describe how she tied her small child to the bars of a
crib before putting something in every orifice of the body a rag
already in the mouth to prevent screaming. I've listened to
descriptions of electroshock on a baby and the baby's seizures."

  Despite Peterson's willingness to share the pain of mothers' "horror
of damaging those they love," however, some of these same mothers have
now turned on her. "The shame and guilt were then transferred to me,
the therapist. Kill the messenger. Lie. This client relived the trauma
by victimizing me. Suddenly, the therapist is the victim."

  Peterson is stung by allegations that she separates families and
encourages Child Protective Services (CPS) to take her patients'
children away. "I've found something new in our field," she told me.
"There's a high degree of mothers who have perpetrated their
children." When she discovers this during therapy sessions, she is
mandated by law to inform social services. "It's almost impossible to
persuade CPS to let children stay with their families under such
circumstances. The CPS people are, unfortunately, mostly incompetent
and overworked."

     I came away from my interview with Judith Peterson thinking that
she was intelligent, assertive and quite possibly insane. She does not
think that she is leading her patients. She completely believes that
they are inhabited by violent, dangerous internal personalities, that
they are a danger to themselves and their families, and that she is
striving to heal the wounds of terrible past trauma. She cannot admit
the possibility that the terror they are experiencing might be an
artifact of her therapy rather than symptoms of past abuse.

  The stories about Judith Peterson told in these pages only skim the
surface. As more of her clients begin to speak publicly, the
incredible paranoia she inspired and the destruction of families
becomes clearer. In 1995, Houston journalist Bonnie Gangelhoff wrote a
devastating article on Peterson called "Devilish Diagnosis." One
former Peterson client told Gangelhoff, "Every day was total chaos
.. . . . You could be talking to someone and suddenly they would switch
personalities. I started doing it, too. It all started to seem so
normal." The husband of a former client revealed that Peterson told
him that "people could control my wife by transmitting sequences of
phone tones to her over the telephone." Peterson herself wrote to the
Texas licensing board, complaining that "an alter was programmed to
knife me in my office."

  [There are footnotes and endnotes to be found in the book.]