
Crime
Recent waves of newborn nostalgia for the 1980s seem to have bypassed the decade’s notable contribution to the annals of mass delusion, the epidemic of recovered memories of satanic child abuse. Lawrence Wright’s Remembering Satan (1994), a piece of reporting that looks increasingly like a durable classic, can serve as a necessary reminder of that page of madness. Wright focused on a single case out of many from that era—but what a case. It began with two young women lodging accusations of sexual abuse against their father, Paul Ingram, a deputy sheriff from Olympia, Washington.
Ingram initially