It must have been the most bizarre trial Judge Nicola Jones has ever presided over. Last Thursday, at Caernarfon crown court in north Wales, she jailed six people for a conspiracy to kidnap a child, at knifepoint, in broad daylight, who apparently believed they were “rescuing” the boy from a satanic cult on the Isle of Anglesey. One of the kidnappers was a north London lawyer, another was a Christian charity counsellor.
The kidnappers were arrested last November after they abducted an eight-year-old boy from the care of his foster mother, who had just collected him after school. The court heard that Anke Hill, 51, grabbed the child, while Wilfred Wong, 56, a “non-practising” barrister, held a knife to the face of the foster mother until, “screaming and hysterical”, she let the boy go. The kidnappers drove off with the terrified youngster as two other women acted as lookouts on the two bridges from Anglesey to the mainland.
The kidnappers were intercepted 4½ hours later by police in armed response units on the M1 in Northamptonshire, more than 150 miles away, after the distraught foster mother called 999.
The court heard that the gang plotted to snatch the boy because they believed he was being subjected to so-called satanic ritual abuse by a cult that supposedly included the child’s father. Police have established that no such cult exists.
The trial was held in secrecy and details are protected, because of court orders. But what we do know is that at some point in late 2019, Wong was contacted by Hill. She lived on Anglesey and had claimed that the child was the victim of satanic abuse. Police investigations found no evidence of this. The child was in foster care but Hill continued to pursue the satanic allegations: she and Wong spent hours on the phone to each other, billing records showed. Wong put her in touch with Janet Stevenson, 67, a counsellor who specialises in working with victims of “satanic abuse”.
The three of them organised an elaborate plan with five other suspects (one was found not guilty; another, Robert Frith, 65, was found dead in his prison cell not long after his arrest). It involved codenames and a clandestine rendezvous at Bangor railway station. They decided to kidnap the boy on his way home from school. He was wrestled from his car seat as Wong held a knife to the foster carer’s face, before slashing one of the car’s tyres to stop her following them.
The judge pulled no punches. Addressing Wong, she said: “You purport to be an expert on satanic ritual abuse. You have interviewed vulnerable victims of abuse yet have no training or qualifications in this respect.” In her sentencing remarks she added: “Your actions have caused unspeakable misery and harm to [name of child redacted], his father and the foster family ... [Name of child redacted] may never psychologically recover from the harm caused by your violent kidnap of him.” The boy is due to be reunited with his father.
The case is the latest example of the resurgence of a phenomenon that has become known as “satanic panic” — a baseless belief that children are being abused for satanic rituals. This panic first emerged in the 1980s and led to allegations of abuse around the world. Now, in a climate of heightened paranoia and conspiracy, it is back with a bang.
The first known reference to the notion of satanic ritual abuse has been traced to the publication in Canada in 1980 of a supposed true memoir entitled Michelle Remembers. The authors, Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder (her therapist, whom she later married), relate how after a miscarriage and 200 hours of therapy, she remembered appalling childhood abuse at the mercy of a murderous satanic cult. Published in the UK in 1981 the book became an international bestseller, but has since been convincingly debunked.
Nevertheless, the idea of satanic ritual abuse spread, notably among fundamentalist Christian campaigners, anti-cult police, social workers and childcare professionals.
Satanic panic reached the UK in the late 1980s and was spread mainly in evangelical Christian circles and among police and social workers. A case of multigenerational incest in Nottingham in 1989 leant credibility, as social workers became convinced there was a satanic element to the abuse. The police disagreed.
The concept hit the mainstream here in March 1990 when the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, at a press conference to launch its annual report, proclaimed the existence of a new and terrifying form of child abuse, satanic ritual abuse, or SRA as it became known. Reporters were briefed that children were being subjected to unspeakable acts — forced to drink blood and eat faeces, raped, tortured and murdered — and that babies were being bred for sacrifice by Devil-worshipping paedophiles.
I have been reporting on satanic panic for 30 years. At the start of the 1990s, I spent months investigating the origins and spread of these lurid claims, interviewing detectives across the UK. They could find no convincing forensic evidence for the existence of SRA — no bodies, no bones, no bloodstains. But suddenly, after the NSPCC’s campaign in early 1990, there emerged stories of satanic abuse being investigated in high-profile cases in the UK, most notably in Rochdale and the Orkneys. There were accounts of children suspected of being victims being snatched from their homes in dawn raids by police and social workers. All ended with no evidence and no convictions — just damning reports on the actions of over-zealous social workers who were convinced by seminars and the latest literature to be on the lookout for satanic abuse.
A UK government-commissioned inquiry published in 1994 concluded that, in the absence of any physical, forensic, corroborative evidence, SRA was a myth. The author, Jean La Fontaine, then emeritus professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, had reviewed 84 police investigations from Kent to Strathclyde. She found no evidence to substantiate the existence of satanic abuse. Similar official inquiries in other countries where the satanic panic had spread, from America to the Netherlands and on to New Zealand and Australia, reached the same conclusion.
While the panic has died down over the past three decades, it has never quite gone away. In 1995, two workers at a council-run nursery in Shieldfield, Newcastle upon Tyne, were falsely accused of sexually abusing children in their care during bizarre rituals with a supposed group of paedophiles. Another case on the Scottish island of Lewis in 2004 involved eight people, including a 75-year-old grandmother, who were accused of abusing children as members of a secret satanic cult. The case was thrown out due to a lack of evidence.
More recently, SRA was lurking in the wings of the investigation into the so-called Westminster paedophile ring, which the Metropolitan Police halted for lack of evidence. It was also there in the claims of sexual assault made against the late prime minister Edward Heath. Among the claimants were three women who claimed they had been abused by people in a satanic cult.
Behind the scenes, a core group of committed believers have been fanning the flames. These people, who often work in psychology and psychotherapy, network through conferences, such as annual events held by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. Simultaneously, there has been a growth in the “adult survivor” movement: people who claim to have recovered memories of historical childhood sexual abuse.
In the UK, one of the most persistent proponents of a belief in the existence of SRA is a group formed in 1989: Rains (Ritual Abuse Information Network and Support). Membership is not widely publicised and the group appears small but in recent years its influence has spread, largely through social media. One of its most enthusiastic supporters was sentenced in Wales last week: Wong.
Born in Singapore, Wong came to the UK in 1986 and was called to the Bar in October 1992. In about 1994, Wong started taking an interest in various Christian campaign movements, including anti-abortion ones. He became a parliamentary researcher and worked with several MPs including David Alton, later Lord Alton of Liverpool, and others involved in the Movement for Christian Democracy.
Other moral outrages have arisen alongside satanic panic. QAnon — a conspiracy theory that believes that a shadowy cabal kidnaps and tortures children, using their blood in satanic rituals — has eerie similarities. Proponents of a belief in the existence of SRA have built cult-like followings on social media, and against this backdrop, Wong’s profile has grown. He and his gang are presented as child-saving heroes. In the UK and America, extremists are raising funds to set up “safe houses” where children “rescued” from satanic cults can be housed.
In 2019, Wong took part in several video interviews destined for YouTube with a former Met detective constable, Jon Wedger. He claims to be a whistleblower who was bullied out of the force for exposing the police cover-up of a child prostitution racket. Wedger has continued to argue that the assault allegations involving Heath are true, despite the police finding no evidence to support the claims.
The commitment of this gang to the belief in the idea of satanic abuse is so strong that the judge was forced to consider it in her sentencing. She concluded that Hill and Wong were the ringleaders. Hill was sentenced to an extended sentence of 19 years and five months, comprising a custodial term of 14 years and five months and extended period on licence of five years. Wong was sentenced to a total of 22 years, comprising a custodial term of 17 years and an extended licence period of five years.
Stevenson, the counsellor, was jailed for 15 years. The judge told her that she still had “entrenched views on the victims of satanic ritual abuse” and, like Hill and Wong, there was a danger she would reoffend because of this belief. Their belief in a conspiratorial world of satanic abuse appears to be more widely held than anyone would care to imagine.
