All the Lies They Did Not Tell

by Pablo Trincia

I was thirty-seven years old and had somehow lost my connection to that bright-eyed twentysomething-year-old who had decided to become a journalist because he cared about people.

Dario’s stories had been leading them down a dark pit for months. Now they’d found the bottom. The ultimate goal of the sect was to commit murder. To feel the thrill of that extreme perversion, to be as evil as possible. There was no other explanation. And if they’d been able to force a child to commit such a vile act, they must have done it themselves, too. Pagano and his colleagues started rooting through missing person archives.

The Morsellis killed cats and forced Cristina to drink their blood; sometimes they “injected” it directly into her. Other times, they forced her into a car and took her to dark alleys around town. Almost every night.

What all these experts seemed to overlook was that the children’s stories could have been contaminated in some way. Someone could have planted a seed in their memories. It then blossomed and grew over time until it devoured their real experiences, substituting them with something that was partially or completely artificial.

“Eyewitnesses who point their finger at innocent defendants are not liars, for they genuinely believe in the truth of their testimony . . . That’s the frightening part—the truly horrifying idea that what we think we know, what we believe with all our hearts, is not necessarily the truth.”

Psychologists used regressive hypnosis, anatomical dolls, drawings, and targeted questions to help children reconstruct a specific event or to confirm the stories of other children who had already been interviewed. It wasn’t unusual for the therapists to be the first to mention satanic ritual abuse to the children.

They were showing how memory can be easily influenced by imagination, feelings, and especially by interrogation methods. “New ‘information’ invades us, like a Trojan horse, precisely because we do not detect its influence,” wrote Professor Loftus in the results of her famous “Lost in the Mall” experiment.

Some of the interviewees initially said they didn’t remember the incident, but upon being questioned again, they corrected themselves. They then reconstructed an entire scene from nothing, enriching it with detail: they described the stores they saw while looking for their mom, the old lady who helped them, their fear, and the subsequent crying fit. After the participants repeated their story a few times, the false memory the psychologists had planted solidified in their minds, mixing with memories of real events.

Yet now, almost twenty years later, a stranger had come to rummage through his memories again. Of course he remembered that wretched year and that little blond boy with glasses, who told strange stories. Dark stories. Horror stories. One day, Dario told Marco and their classmates that Rita, their teacher, had taken him to the cemetery. Marco couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but he never forgot those stories. They’d affected him so strongly that they insinuated the same “memory” into his mind. “I’m . . . sure that what I’m about to tell you never happened,” he told me during our short phone call. “But I have a clear memory of Mrs. Spinardi taking us to the cemetery at night, and opening the gate to let us in.”

Once a week, he and his team met with children younger than six years old. During their meetings, he would ask them if they remembered an incident in which they ended up in the hospital after accidentally sticking their finger in a mousetrap. The team asked the question multiple times during the meetings, leading more than 50 percent of the children—all of whom had initially denied the incident—to change their minds. They made up a story from scratch, and it became increasingly detailed as time went on.

Professor Loftus and Dr. Ceci—along with many other researchers who’d become increasingly interested in the “misinformation effect”—declared a bona fide war within the field of psychology, which split into two opposing sides. One side urged caution, preferring the use of interview techniques that prevented the risk of creating false memories—questions that were open rather than suggestive. The other argued that this approach tended to favor the abusers at the expense of the victims.

The job of the psychologist is to verify whether the minor is able to bear witness and can provide a version of events that hasn’t been contaminated. It is not the consultant’s job to establish whether the child was a victim of abuse. That is up to the court—and only the court.

“For this reason, more and more consultants are refusing to respond when judges ask them whether abuse occurred,” explained forensic psychiatrist Marco Lagazzi. “That can and should only be established by the judge. All we can do is provide a psychological profile and evaluate the child’s ability to give testimony. Or to verify that their testimony of a given event hasn’t been distorted by pressure or suggestion. Nothing more.”

Introvigne, M., Satanism: A Social History, Brill Academic Pub., Leiden-Boston 2016.