False Memories, Forgiveness and The Satanic Panic - Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater

You may know Alice Sebold as the author of The Lovely Bones but you may not know the story of Alice and Anthony. Anthony Broadwater was exonerated in the 1981 rape of Ms.Sebold. Listen to the Truer Crime Season 2 episode 3 for all of the details on the case. Today Emily and Ashley chat about the bigger themes of her episode...False Memories, Forgiveness and The Satanic Panic. Thank you for listening.

TW: SA, Abuse, Child Abuse, Murder

Show notes:

0:00-1:00 intro

1:00-4:00 An Overview of the case

4:30 Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson case

6:30 Eye witness testimony and knowing what's going on around us

7:20 What is the weapon focus effect?

8:20 Working memory and memory in general

10:00 Elizabeth Loftus - False Memories

14:30 False Memory task Dr. Reeder does with her students

19:00 Satanic Panic

20:00 Mcmartin Preschool Trial

25:00 The book The Secret

27:20 Paul Ingram story

37:00 Making a Murderer (Netflix)

39:00 Forgiveness Study and the power of forgiveness and what is the REACH method?

45:00 Who is forgiveness for?

Loftus, Loftus, & Messo (1987) - Weapon Focus Effect https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf01044839

Loftus and Palmer (1974) - Automobile accident - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1975-04498-001

Roediger & McDermott (1995) - False memory in word lists - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1995-42833-001

Wright (1993) The New Yorker on Paul Ingram -

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/17/remembering-satan-part-i

Picking Cotton book - https://www.pickingcottonbook.com/

Elizabeth Loftus Ted Talk -  https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_how_reliable_is_your_memory

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/the-power-of-forgiveness

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/forgiveness-your-health-depends-on-it

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/josiah-sutton/id1565741041?i=1000523760385

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2018/06/09/brendan-dasseys-false-confession-supreme-court-column/652915002/

https://www.instagram.com/celisiastanton/?hl=en

Truer Crime https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/truer-crime/id1565741041

Transcript

Sebold final edit

 Hi, I'm Emily. I'm Ashley, and this is books with your besties. Please check the trigger warnings in our show notes before listening to this episode. Hi, besties. Welcome back. This week we are talking about. We listened to a podcast and we just have to talk about it. So we are doing a listen with us over on Patreon with our Patreon members. We do this kind of thing, read with us or listen with us, and we chose true crime podcast True or Crime? It is hosted by Felicia Stanton. It's an incredible podcast. We loved season one and season two is just now dropping. They had a super powerful The Assassination of MLK episode that came out last week, and Lauren McCluskey, which we also did a podcast episode here on books with Your besties on. And this week we want to talk about the Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater episode, episode three. It came out Monday of this week. So if you're listening to this right when we drop it, it is right after that released. Just be warned that last night I was walking my dog listening to the Alice Sebold episode and had to text Emily and say, it's hard to cry and walk in 28 degree weather at the same time. Alicia does such an extraordinary job walking you through the entire case and just not missing a beat. It's a fantastic, devastating episode. Your tears were freezing. My tears were freezing. So here's the thing. When we first were talking with Alicia about true crime, and she asked if we knew who Alice Sebold was. I was like, of course, Lovely Bones. Like, we're a book club. Of course we know Lovely Bones. But how had I not heard this whole entire story of her life? Pause here, because you have to go and listen to the true crime episode first and come back to us. It's a really exceptional episode. I did cry a lot in it as well. This is why Felicia is such a powerful host. Is that the Lauren McCluskey episode? I did not cry, but I was enraged. I was enraged. And then the Alice Sebold Anthony Broadwater episode. I could not stop crying. I cried at the beginning, and I cried at the end for both of the victims in the case. So just a little bit about the case, but so you have some context here. Alice Seewald, who's the author of Lovely Bones, was tragically raped, and the account of how she survived walked away is tragic, and she ends up going to the police and talking about her experience. And then a while later, believes with everything in her body, that she sees the man who attacked her. There's a line up. She picks someone out of the lineup. I'm going to let you listen to Felicia's episode to hear how wrong that entire situation was. Anthony Broadwater is found guilty and sentenced to what we believe was 16 years did his time. And it turns out he was not the one that raped her. And on the episode, we learn all about how the two of them came to a place where he forgave her, and it seems like she's still really working through all of the emotions around being both a rape victim and now feeling tremendous guilt for playing a role in sending someone to prison who was not, in fact, her rapist. So that is where we are today. And on this episode today, we're going to talk about false memories, forgiveness and everything that went into how this happened, why it happened, and how it seems like they're both trying to move forward. Yeah, it was really a the testimony of the story of eyewitness misidentification and the human spirit and forgiveness. And I cannot imagine how incredibly traumatizing the whole experience has been for both Anthony Broadwater and Alice Sebold. Absolutely. If you listen to the episode, you'll just hear how he comes around to saying, you know, I understand you're also a victim, and that we're both victims of what the justice system did here, and it's not your fault. So here's the topics for today with my background in psychology and law. This is about five classes worth of content that I'm going to try to squeeze into 20 minutes here. We're going to talk about attention and memory issues as it relates to eyewitness testimony. We're going to talk about false memories and the satanic panic. And we are going to close out the episode with some cool stuff about forgiveness. Hang out with us while we talk about all these things. I'm so excited to learn from you. Um, okay. Well, first let me tell you what this immediately spurred is. You know that there is a parallel case to this. It's a fascinating story. It's very similar. Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson are the players in this story. And Jennifer Thompson was brutally raped by knifepoint. And she reports that as she was raped, she thought, I am going to study this man's face so that I can identify him. I want to know who this man is. So she literally intentionally studied him so she could later identify him. Long story short, she identified a man who became a suspect because a tiny bit of circumstantial evidence that came up that they thought maybe this Ronald Cotton guy was involved and he flubbed his alibi. He flubbed what night he had done what it was a simple error on his part, but it became problematic and looked like a lie. And they put him in a lineup. And he was a black man. She was a white woman. And he looked similar enough to her that she thought it was him. Later, in another type of lineup, she identified him again, the detective on the case who now talks about reform and the need for reform. He confirmed what she found, so she thought she got it right. So in the courtroom, she was ready to identify this man. He went to prison. He spent over ten years in prison before another man named Bobby Poole. They found his DNA matched to the crime. Ronald Cotton was exonerated and released from prison. And Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson met. He forgave her, and they formed a friendship and relationship. And they toured together, speaking about eyewitness testimony and the need for reform in the legal system, and wrote a book called Picking Cotton. We'll link that for you in the show. Note it's a very similar story with a very similar outcome. So really thinking about the strength of these men to forgive and move on with their life after such horrible tragedy and acknowledging the pain that these women went through. At any rate, there's a really good 2020 also that you can search for. Done on the picking cotton case and eyewitness misidentification. Okay, so that is one thing I just wanted to know, but what it really brings me into is just concepts about memory and selection. Noted that psychologists suggest that memory is primarily a reconstruction of events and is really flawed. And that could not be more true, but I'm going to expand on that today. There are two factors here that are really at play when you're an eyewitness to a crime and one is attention, what do we pay attention to in our environment at any given time? If you stop and you think about your environment, there are all kinds of sounds and feelings and smells that you are just completely not attending to because they are not relevant to your current situation, right? If we didn't have attentional direction, we would be so distracted by the sound of the fire constantly, right? Or other people's tapping pencils when we're sitting in a classroom. But it's super limited how much we can attend to. And I'm going to give you one example of this. There's some great classic studies on it's selective attention because we're very selective about what we attend to. The weapon focus effect would be one thing that I could tangibly tell you about, that demonstrates how limited our attention is. When there is a weapon present in a crime. There is some evidence through research, Loftus and Meso in 1987 provided kind of the first evidence of the weapon focus effect that we are more likely to look at a weapon than at the person holding the weapon. So staring at a gun, people are capable of talking about details as it relates to and describing in detail the gun. They have less detail about the person's face or their clothing or their hair than when there's not a weapon present. So the threat of a weapon can really change where we focus our attention. You can imagine if you're being held at knifepoint. Attending to where that knife is, what the knife is doing may actually direct attention away from other factors going on. But memory itself is also limited. There are multiple types of memory, and working memory is what we're kind of thinking about at any given time. We don't actually encode everything to long term memory. It's why you can't remember what you had for lunch on a Tuesday a month ago. It's just not helpful to know. It clutters our brain. We have limitations in how much we can attend to in store, so we just don't. We filter things out. We have to think about how in any given environment, that memory that we're working with is limiting us. So there are things like primacy and recency effects. So a primacy effect is that we are most likely to remember the things that happen first and the recency effect. We can remember the things that happened last. In any given scenario, the very beginning of it and the very end of it, maybe things that we remember better than the whole middle that gets a little muddled. But we also have framing effects. Here's some here's some really common ones that we talk about with this. Do you think people actually. Do you think people are more likely to buy meat that is 93% lean or that is labeled as 7% fat? 93% lean completely. And researchers find the meat just flies off the shelf if it's labeled as 93% lean, but nobody's touching the 7% fat stuff. It's the same thing, right? But the way you frame it really matters for our perceptions. People are more likely to vote for a tax relief than a tax cut, because relief implies a burden. People are more confident in the safety of using a condom that is 90% effective than condoms with a 10% fail rate. It's kind of disturbing how much we are influenced just by the way things are presented to us. So I'm going to tell you how critical this is. Elizabeth Loftus who. I already mentioned the loft, Loftus and Meso study before about the weapon focus effect. Elizabeth Loftus is one leading researcher on all things false memory. She has a great Ted talk that will link for you. That gives a great synopsis of some of the things we're going to talk about, and some things that we're not going to talk about. Definitely go watch her Ted talk as well. She did a study Loftus and Palmer They gave participants. They showed participants a less than 32nd clip of a car accident. Just a simple car accident that people saw. And afterward, she asked participants to estimate the speed at which they thought the cars were going. However, she manipulated one word in the question to people. She changed the word hit in the sentence to other words. So she said, how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other? When they collided each other? When they bumped each other, hit each other, or contacted each other. So each participant just saw one of these words. But they were all different, right? What they found is the estimated speed was affected by which one of these verbs they encountered. Participants who got the word smashed reported speeds of 40.8mph, where participants who got the word contacted. Reported 31.8mph, nine miles per hour slower. The pattern actually went down by the words, so that you could see that participants thought the cars were going fastest. When they were asked how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other, then collided, then bumped. Then hit. Then contacted. They did a follow up study. The follow up study brought back participants one week later, and they asked participants if they saw broken glass on the ground. Yes or no. There was no broken glass in the video. When participants were asked how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other? 30% of them reported seeing broken glass. The participants, who had been asked how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? Only 15% of them saw broken glass, so participants who'd been asked how fast they'd been going when they smashed were more likely to report falsely seeing broken glass in a false memory than participants who had been told hit. This is an example of just how much the way that things are asked and questioning can distort memory. So the very first time that Alice Sebold was questioned about Anthony Broadwater. That very first time influenced her later perceptions of what happened in the event. Total sidebar. But what you are saying as I was researching stuff about this episode and what we were going to talk about today, this came up with how police also are allowed to provide false information to try to get people to confess to crimes. So not only are people remembering things that potentially weren't there, they're being fed information to then distort their memory even more. That's a topic for a totally different day. But Emily, what you're talking about is a what I would say simple memory. You see a video of two cars that shouldn't be hard to remember. I would think I could remember the color of the car, how fast they were going, but the fact that they saw broken glass when there wasn't any. How are you supposed to remember something about someone who attacked you five years ago at night? I don't know, I have so many questions about eyewitness testimony and our memories, so just keep schooling us on all of it. I do too, and and one of the biggest issues is that we are so confident in our memory and we feel so compelled by our own memories that we are unwilling to accept that they may be flawed or incorrect. No, no, no, I remember, so I know for sure. Psychologists like myself know. Probably not. Probably. You're wrong. Like when I remembered we went on a dangerous hike in Tahoe and you were like, no, that's Turkey. Exactly. I was convinced. Convinced? And this is the thing. What's really actually even better is probably. We were both wrong. I said it was turkey. It probably wasn't turkey. It was probably somewhere else. This is what I always say. Those arguments you get in where you argue with someone else about how something happened, you should actually step back and acknowledge you both constructed the memory differently from other things, and probably both of you are wrong in some way. Like let it go. And it gets us into false memory. So there's actually a false memory task that I give my students. It's the Roediger and McDermott task. And I will link for you in our show notes, the Roediger and McDermott 1995 study. It's a really simple word list task. You give a list of words 15 words. And I'm going to ruin this. I hope none of my future students see this because it's so fun to do in class with them. If you're going to be a student ever in my classroom, please discontinue this episode immediately or skip ahead. Two minutes. You give these words and I'll give you an example from the word list. Some of the words might be and I'll read them like this to my students. Tart pie. Teeth, honey. Cake. Chocolate. Right. Do you see a theme? I see a theme. That teeth shouldn't be there. But everything else is a dessert. I think it actually was. Tooth is what I should have said was tooth. But it's sweet. It's activating. It's a semantic activation of the word sweet. So I'll never say the word sweet in the word list, but my students will write down the word sweet when I tell them, okay, now write down all the 15 words that I said. First off. Our working memory is so limited, we generally can remember seven items at any given time with a standard deviation of two, which means about 9,596% of the population can remember between 3 and 11 items at any given time. Right. So that's not very many. So even if you have an exceptionally good working memory and you're at the top 5%, you can only remember 11 things at a time in your memory. So if I give you 15 words, you're not going to remember all 15. I've never, ever had a student who successfully remembered all 15 words that I give them. And I'm telling you, I read the words like that tart pie. Honey. And then I say go. And they write the words down. I mean, we are talking within seconds. There's memory decay. You can see, first off, how limited it is. I demonstrate to them the primacy and recency effect with it. They all remember the first word and they all remember the last word. But the words in the middle get a little jumbled. But then about 30% of my students will write down the word sweet. There's a secondary interesting thing that Roediger and McDermott have also studied, and that is that you can ask people whether or not they remember the moment that I said the word sweet, or if they just kind of know that it was said, and they'll write a little R or a little K, do they remember each word, or do they know that it was said about all these words? And I will have students who tell me they remember me saying, sweet. They remember that moment. They actually formed a memory in their brain in a five minute demonstration in class of me saying something I never said. It's really easy to manipulate memory. Now, does this translate to eyewitness testimony because this is semantic activations? Maybe not exactly in the same way, but the concept of us using memory as a perfect representation of what happened in the world. It's certainly demonstrated in just a very small task like that. We should not be utilizing our memory as all truth all the time. It should be a helpful tool then verification. What was it Salesa said in the Innocence Project? Like 60 or 70% of the cases involved eyewitness misidentification? Yeah. And when I did a little bit of research and read about wrongfully convicted people exonerated, it was something like 11 out of the 12 cases had to do with eyewitness testimony. That was incorrect. Terrible. And and think about the responsibility on the eyewitness. Okay. The next place we're going. And by the way, you brought up something that I also got excited about is that police can lie and we should go there again. I wrote down the name of somebody. I almost started ranting about one of these cases where that happened, but I'll put a pin in it and we can save it for a future episode. The thing is here. The thing is, we cannot sit there and go see eyewitnesses are wrong. How terrible of them. Because they are actually creating memories around these incidents. Alice Sebold and Jennifer Thompson live with the memory of that person raping them, that face, that person. That's what Jennifer Thompson said. She remembered Ronald Cotton raping her, and she was asked, who do you picture now when you think about the incident? And she said, nobody. There's no face. That has to have been extraordinarily effortful because she had this very solid, secure memory of the incident with Ronald Cotton as her attacker. And he is not. That memory is false. Okay. So here's where we go from here. This is just a logical jump for me. For the rest of you, you're gonna be like, what? The satanic panic. The satanic panic is basically a collection of false memories that were all created in the 1980s. And then action taken based on those false memories. That's what it is. It's a false memory craze. The Satanic Panic was not actually about satanic cult acting in specific ways. It was about people recovering memories of childhood sexual abuse that they had allegedly repressed, and bringing those forward, and then adding satanic elements to them that it was all part of Satanic ritual. So this first really kicked off with a book called Michelle Remembers. You can go and Google this book and look at the cover. It is like a little girl who recovered memories of child sexual abuse. It was written by a therapist in Canada. And here's the thing we're just not even going to talk about this book. It's been completely discredited as false. But what happened next is a slew of cases of people remembering or bringing forward child sexual abuse. The McMartin preschool trials is one of the earlier cases on this, and you can go in-depth. We'll give you a link to look at timelines of the McMartin preschool trials so that you can get a good look at it, but it is so damaging. Essentially, a woman named Judy Johnson. Tad, her son, two and a half year old son Billy, at the McMartin preschool. This was in Manhattan Beach, California, and it was 1983 when this all happened, and she seems to have some mental illness. Potentially. Her son was having painful bowel movements, I believe, and she spotted some blood near his anus. And she started to question what was happening at the preschool. How did this happen? And basically brought forward to the police that she believed her son had been sexually molested by the preschool teachers at McMartin preschool. The police naturally crafted a letter saying your children may have been sexually abused. You should question them, and sent it to about 200 parents that were related to the preschool. Okay. Talk about leading. And we just talked about how questioning interference can be problematic. Right. It changes your memory of events. So these parents, of course, are horrified and panicking. Uh, they arrested within two months. A month, within a month of the first complaint. Ray Buckey, who was one of the teachers, was arrested. And these the letter was sent out at the same time. Judy Johnson made reports of things that were completely bizarre, and they continued to get more and more bizarre. They took, uh, examples or they took the children in a hot air balloon somewhere. They sacrificed a goat at an altar. They took Billy to a car wash and locked him in a trunk. They wore a the preschool teacher, Ray Buckey, wore a cape, a Santa Claus costume. Um, he chopped up rabbits. They. At one point, there were allegations by some children or parents that a child was strung up to a tree in the front yard of the school and whipped with a stick shaped like a gun. These are kids fantasies, right? Lots of talk about that. The teachers would take them into secret tunnels underground in at the school and would molest them there. The school was excavated. The grounds were excavated. There's footage and photographs. You can see this. And no tunnels were discovered underground. So there were Verifiably false accusations. Clearly, they weren't taking kids in a hot air balloon or in the front yard, stringing up a child naked to a tree without anyone noticing. Right? These things were just just patently false. But there was this sort of runaway concern about how could it not be false? I will tell you, what is really horrible is that they had officers come in. I believe the FBI was involved. Oh, it was the district? Yeah. A consultant for the Children's Institute International, Kee McFarlane, was supposed to interview these child sex victims and interviews. You can read the transcripts online. Are horrifying. The suggestive questionings and the leading questions and the coercion to get these kids to make statements about what happened to them. Things like, well, only brave children can remember. Do you think you can remember or are you not one of the brave children? Um, well, other kids said that there was a game called Naked Movie Star. Do you know about a game called Naked Movie Star? Think really hard and see if you can use your thinking brain. And if you're smart enough to be able to tell us about Naked Movie Star leading these children down a path of saying things that were untrue, or creating these false memories, and how damaging to these children to implant in them the idea that they had been sexually assaulted by a teacher when they had not. That is not how any of these interviews happen now. It's just very disturbing. So. This is what happened at the McMartin preschool. This went on for years. By 1991. So that's eight years later. They demolished the McMartin preschool. All of the, uh, all of the preschool teachers had been arrested at this time. Peggy Buckey was acquitted on all counts in 1990. Ray Buckey was tried multiple times and twice, and they decided not to ask for a third trial in 1990. And then Virginia McMartin, who was the grandmother, died in 1995 at 88 years old. I mean, these people were absolutely drugged through the mud and put through the wringer with no actual evidence of any wrongdoing. This is kind of the start of the Satanic panic or one of the early cases. So there are a lot of cases. And if you watch the Elizabeth Loftus Ted talk, you'll be able to see about another case. Eileen Franklin, that I was with Loftus talks about at this time, there were therapists who were doing hypnotherapy to help people recover repressed child sexual abuse. And there's actually a book that came out in 1988 called The Courage to Heal. This was a very popular book at the time. Do you remember the book The Secret? Ashley. Yes. And recently people have been talking about it again. I'm like, why are we talking about the secret again? Okay. Yes. The secret is like a pop psychology book, right? Like, by the way, I can tell you the secret and it's positive thinking. Anyway, that's what they say in the book. So the secret, uh, pop phenomenon. This the Courage to heal kind of a pop phenomenon book. Oh, this is really going to help people. This will help people to become a better, um, self. And people found this a really compelling book. Here's the thing is, I have the book in my office at work. It says you may need to recover childhood sexual abuse memories like you probably repressed some memories about being abused as a child sexually. And let us help you go through that if you can't recover them right away, here's some ways to try harder. And it also has lists of things that are like. Here are some symptoms you may be experiencing that would lead us to believe that you had repressed some memories about child sexual abuse. Are you ever? Sleepy, you know. Do you have insomnia? Do you wear baggy clothing? Do you feel like you don't love your body? I mean, things that a lot of people can say yes to or have many of those kinds of symptoms. So this was really kind of a craze at the time of people starting to think maybe I was sexually abused as a child and I repressed that information. Okay. I'm going to tell you about one more story about the false memory case craze, a case that is talked about less frequently than the McMartin preschool trial, but I think is just another good example. And it's just fascinating. That's the story of Paul Ingram because it demonstrates something else. Paul Ingram, this was in 1988. So right in the heart of all of this happening. He was a strong Christian man, married to Sandy and had two daughters. Uh, his daughters were Erica and Julie. So Erica and Julie, Paul's daughters, when they were in in 1988, they went to a heart to heart retreat. This was a church retreat that they had been to multiple times. It was hosted. It was a 2 or 3 day in-depth retreat. And this woman, Carla Franco, who claimed to have a gift of prophecy and she came to minister at the retreat. One of the daughters, Erika, made allegations of sexual abuse at a previous retreat, I think in 1985 or 1983 against a church counselor, and in 1985, both of the girls made child sexual abuse allegations against a neighbor. Both of those were dismissed immediately and discredited. They were found to be untrue. The 1983 and the 1985 allegations. So this is 1988. There at another one of these church retreats, Carla Franco suggests somebody in this room has been molested. Somebody in this room has, uh, has repressed the molestation. And all of a sudden, the church has a flurry of young girls who are all claiming they must have been molested as children, and they've repressed it. Both Carla and Julie, after the retreat, alleged that they, their father, had been sexually assaulting them for years. he was arrested, Paul Ingram was arrested. And here's what's really sad is very quickly he felt like his girls wouldn't lie. Could he have done this? And you can read parts of his interviews where he says things like, I don't remember doing any of these things, but maybe there's a dark side of me that I have repressed and I can't remember, and I must have done these things if they're saying I did these things. So he fully confessed. He confessed to so many things that eventually kind of jumping ahead in the story, he confessed to him and a friend killing one of the victims who turned out to be a victim of the green River killer. Right. So clearly, he's not confessing to only things that he knows he did and his interview transcripts. He says a lot of I would have done this. They'd said, okay, walk us through the night of, you know, assaulting your child. Well, I would have done this, and then I would have done that. And then I and they kept correcting him. You mean you whatever you did. And he'd say, oh, I did. But I need to go back to Saint. I would have, because he couldn't actually remember doing any of these things. He was creating memories around this. Um, the girl's allegations. Eric and Julie's allegations became absolutely bizarre, as most things did in this time period. They claimed they were raped in more than 800 satanic rituals. They claim they had been given abortions by their father at one point. People are. The investigators said there's no way that your mother could not have known these things were happening if this was this prolific. And they said, okay, well, then our mom was involved and they started bringing Sandy into the accusations. They claimed they were given an abortion during a ritual and then forced to eat chopped up pieces of her dead baby. I know this is really dark. Erica claims she was impregnated many times, but no one could ever verify they saw her pregnant, so there was never any verification of that, they believed. They claimed that their bodies were covered with scars from long term abuse. And Julie said she was so scared she couldn't change her clothes in public. Uh, it was just too embarrassing for her. And Erica said that she had spent half her life in hospitals because of the abuse. When the detectives actually looked at the girl's bodies, medical reports showed that the girls had one scar between the two of them, and it was an appendectomy scar on Erica, both the girls told the medical examiner they were not sexually active and had never had abortions, and when examining them, found that to be the case, that it was virtually impossible for either of the girls to have ever had abortions based on their anatomy. However, despite despite these wild allegations. Oh! At 1.2, they also said that they had been with a satanic cult and they had killed nine people. They'd seen nine different people murdered, and they went and buried that. I don't know if the nine people were all at one time or different times. Detectives went and investigated and excavated and found no bones, no evidence of any kind of dead bodies. And in fact, I'm just going to pause here for a second and say that the FBI actually did convene a task force and had people involved in investigating satanic cults during this time, and they found literally no evidence. So all of the claims they were getting of satanic rituals are happening here. Babies are being eaten there. They couldn't find any evidence of human blood, of human remains, of satanic activities, of people saying they were part of the satanic cults. Or being involved or talking about any of it. They could find no evidence. So all of these were these very far fetched as you can see. As you can see, 800 satanic ritual rapes and and an intact hymen. That's unlikely. What's really sad is that Paul Ingram in 1996, he he he was sentenced to 20 years for his confessions. Uh, in 1996, he went up for appeal and he was denied. They said there was no evidence that his confessions were coerced. And he was released in 2003 after serving his time. So this was extremely traumatizing. What's horrible to think about is that these girls, Erika and Julie, lived with these false memories. They lived with the memory of their mother holding them down while their father assaulted them with a meat fork. One of the allegations was when she was little, one of the girls said that her father would have poker nights and then bring in all of the poker men to take turns raping her. Like a sex ring of pedophiles, which this is all just creations, primarily. And here's the thing. Here's the thing is, I sound very dismissive, but this is so harmful. This was so harmful. When you create false memories and we can see how directly harmful it is that Alice Sebald had a false memory of Anthony Broadbent raping her. And we can see how harmful it is that Jennifer Thompson created a false memory around Ronald Ronald Cotton raping her. We can see that directly. Right. But there are very real victims of child sexual abuse who this diminishes their experience or makes them look less believable when we create false narratives around this stuff. Right. And at the time, I'm not saying this was intentional, but this was something that was happening that we know better. This is one of those things where I worry a lot about social media, about when will this happen again, and in what way? So people getting on social media and self diagnosing with anxiety or ADHD as they do, that's not something that we should be doing right. We should allow the experts to diagnose those things and not create. Kind of a panic, another panic about something. And I know that's on a totally different degree or a different level, but there is likely to be recurrence of these kinds of, of things. And what we don't want to do is then victimize more those who actually experience these terrible things. One of the things that was brought up on this Lisa Stanton episode was exactly what you just said to, which is that some of these victims, like Alice Siebold, like Jennifer, they're not lying. They have these memories and it is real to them. So it's not fair to say you lied about him doing this. It's not a lie. It's that they really think that this happened and this is who did it. Correct. And and they are not alone in the responsibility for that. Right? The system of the way that lineups are presented to people, the system by which people are, are questioned. You brought up that police can lie. Listen, there's a case that I want to talk about. Of of a man named Marty Tinkler who spent 17 years in prison or something when he was 17 years old. They accused him of of killing his parents, and they told him that his dad woke up in the hospital, was still alive, woke up and said, Marty did this. And Marty thought to himself, that's what the police told him in his interview. His father never woke up. He was dead from the whole time. But Marty said to himself, my father would never lie. I must have done this and falsely confessed. This is. We're gonna have to do a whole nother episode on this because, you know, um, making a murder. Yeah. They were talking about Brandon, who was convicted of murdering. If you watch. Anyway, I'm not going to give the whole thing away. Total spoiler alerts, but they walk through how the police got him to confess by feeding him false information. They said, well, what? What did you hit her in the head with? And he said something like, um, a golf club. And they were like, no, keep going. And until he got the answer right, they kept saying no. And then by the time he finally said, well, I shot her, they were like, yep, you did. You shot her in the head because they just kept feeding him information until they got to the point that he said, yep, that's that's what it was. That is so terrible and disturbing. And it's not to say that that police interrogations aren't a value and aren't accurate. A lot of the time this is problematic. But the system that that this can happen, they're just it's good that we talk about reforms. Yes. It's necessary. It's necessary. The interrogations are needed. But there has to be a point at which you cannot just completely lie to try to to get someone to falsely confess. Anyway, the thing is, today it is for another day. We should totally talk about false confessions in general. Because the thing is, there's there's so many reasons that they happen. And, and I think it's good for the public to know that they can happen. If the public were more informed about that, we might weigh them less heavily. Write a confession, eyewitness testimony. Any of those things should not be the only evidence in a case or an eyewitness that that leads. Well, no, I'm not even going to go there. Topic for a different day. So I have a question for you. I'm kind of putting you on the spot, and you might not know the answer to this, but when that dad got out of jail, was he able to reconcile with his daughters? Was there forgiveness? Did they move forward or was it too far gone? I don't think that they ever did reconcile. I don't think so. And, you know, I think that his daughters live with those memories and believe that they are still, you know, were abused in that way. But. Well, that was a bigger theme if you want to get into it for a second. On the Anthony Broadwater Alice Sebold episode about forgiveness. So do you want to talk about that just a little bit while I have you here? Okay. So the forgiveness thing that really struck me was that he wanted to be in the room with her, and he acknowledged how painful This would be for Alice as well, and he doesn't fault her for how this happened. He feels like the system failed her, and I just. I'm really moved by that. I was really moved by that. And it made me cry a lot, just thinking about how he was victimized so terribly and he could have hatred for her, and he doesn't. So you tell me what you learned about forgiveness in the human condition. I learned a lot. So there's so much research going on right now about forgiveness that Harvard University had a two day conference on it where they brought together philosophers, theologians, psychologists, lawyers, people who study peace and public health to be like, what is the impact of choosing to forgive? On your physical health? Your mental health? A two day conference bringing together all of these people. So in an article by Jeremy Sutton in 2020 called The Psychology of Forgiveness, which looked at ten research findings around forgiveness, he said learning to forgive is vital for both our mental and physical wellbeing. Increasing positive emotions while reducing negative ones such as blame and anger, benefits our cardiovascular health and reduces ill health. Forgiveness is essential for a fully functional society and has considerable personal benefits, increasing our potential for making connections with others and having a more positive, happier outlook on life. Furthermore, by mentally switching between thoughts of goodwill and holding a grudge. Your blood pressure goes down, your heart rate lowers, your muscle tension decreases, and feelings of needing to have mental toughness or control are reduced. So the more you practice forgiving, the more it literally impacts your overall physical health, your cortisol levels, your blood pressure. I didn't know you probably do this then, but I didn't know that there are two different sides to forgiveness and I had no idea. So there's a method called the reach method. And they talked about this in a Harvard Medical School study, which I will link. So there are two sides to forgiveness decisional and emotional. And I'm not gonna lie, I honestly feel like sometimes after reading this I will do a decisional forgiveness towards someone where I'm like, I forgive you, but I do not emotionally forgive them. And if you don't do the emotional piece, you don't get the physiological or physical benefits of it. And I'll tell the listeners, I think you, Emily, are very good. And I've always said this about forgiving and genuinely moving on. And I've learned so much from being your friend about what that looks like. And I think because you know, the benefit for yourself and truly moving forward, and the benefit for the other person in knowing that they are forgiven. So that aside, this article taught me about these two sides. So there are two sides to forgiveness decisional and emotional decision. Forgiveness involves a conscious choice to replace ill with goodwill, so you no longer wish bad things to happen to that individual. It's quicker and easier to accomplish. But for emotional forgiveness, you move away from those negative feelings and no longer dwell on the wrongdoing. Emotional forgiveness is much harder and takes longer, and it's common for those feelings to return on a regular basis. This often happens when you think about the offender or something triggers the memory, or you still suffer from the adverse consequences of the action, they reiterate. Practicing forgiveness has powerful health benefits. Observational studies and even some randomized trials suggest that forgiveness is associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, hostility, reduced substance use, higher self-esteem, and overall greater life satisfaction. So in the article, they talk about a method called the Reach method, which stands for recall, emphasize altruistic gift, commit, and hold. And these are what each of those steps look like for people who are really looking to forgive and am. I think as I read these, you're gonna recall the episode where Anthony wants to be in a room with her because I really, genuinely feel like he worked through all of these steps to get to that point. So the recall step, the first step is to recall the wrongdoing in an objective way, which is hard, right? Because if you've been hurt by someone, you have big feelings. So the goal is not to think of the person in a negative light or wallow in self-pity, but to come to a clear understanding of the wrong that was done. Visualize the person and the situation. Don't push anything aside if it makes you feel angry or upset. And then you move to empathize. Try to understand the other person's point of view regarding why he or she hurt you without minimizing the wrong that was done. Sometimes the wrongdoing was not personal, but due to something the other person was dealing with. People who attack others or sometimes themselves in a state of fear, worry and hurt. So after you sit with that and try to empathize, you move to altruistic gift. This step is about addressing your own shortcomings, which is hard. Recall a time when you treated someone harshly and were forgiven. How did it make you feel? And then commit. Commit yourself to forgive. For instance, write about your forgiveness in a journal or a letter that you don't send or tell to a friend because then you're making it about yourself, right? So you have to commit that you are forgiving this person. And then lastly, hold. So hold on to your forgiveness. This step is tough because memories of the event will often recur. Forgiveness is not erasure. Rather, it's about changing your reaction to the memories. So when the bad feelings arise, remind yourself that you have forgiven and ultimately you want good for the offender. So don't you think those steps that Anthony worked through, all of those. I just kept thinking of him and how he he really put himself in her shoes. Yeah. What's said like you're you are a victim, too. I find it so amazing that he was able to go through that process and do that without ever having a conversation with her or contact with her. He didn't need her for him to forgive, I thought, because that's one of my hangups, right? Like, I need to forgive, but I'm like, but there has to be Remorse or I have from them, or I have to hear that they want that forgiveness or. No, that's not what it's about. That was one of the most powerful things in reading these studies about forgiveness. That was when you're choosing to forgive. Yes, you're both doing it for that person, but you're doing it for yourself. You need to be able to to move forward in a way that you're not letting this hold you, hold you back in such, in such negative ways. So that's unforgiveness. It's a very hard thing to practice, but obviously a very important thing. Very. I'm going to work on that. And I appreciate you sharing about how I'm going to look at the reach method and and work on it. I don't think forgiveness is easy. I do not like to hold grudges, and I like to let things go. And I think that relationships are flawed, and there's always going to be things that happen in relationships that are harmful. And I caused that harm and others caused that harm. And I don't want to lose my relationships because of mistakes that I make. And I don't want to lose relationships because someone else has made a mistake, even if it hurt me. And I think forgiveness is something that takes practice. And it's like a muscle, like anything else where it's something that you just have to practice. We got into a fairly lengthy conversation about exonerations, but decided we're going to save that for another day and another episode. So we'll link for you the Innocence Project and go and donate, if you so are so inclined. And look at some of these cases and who knows, maybe you want to get involved. There's also a case in True Crime Season one. I'm going to link about someone who is wrongfully convicted, and it has to do with DNA and basically that you're responsible people in that office. So on that note, go listen to True Crime Season two, Alice Sebold, Anthony Broadwater case, and hang out with us again next week. Thanks for listening. Listening. Thanks for listening. For more content, find us on Patreon at the Creepy Book Club. Happy reading! This.