An Open Letter to Kerr Cuhulain,

The Wiccan Community

And

The Church of Satan

I wrestled about whether I should respond, after reading a recent addition to the “witch hunt” series written by Kerr Cuhulain, police officer and Wiccan advocate. I decided I could not let it go unanswered. My last e-mail communications with Kerr will be my last personal communication with him or anyone like him, because I am weary of being fodder for someone's personal agenda cannon. Granted, he quoted me accurately. I just wasn't expecting my sincere efforts at dialogue to become another volley to try to discredit us.

Who is “us”? The good men and women who, for over a decade, were engaged in a vicious war against criminal occultists. The list of those brave people was extensive, and Kerr has meticulously dissected the work of each, deeming them frauds and quacks.

There is a saying: Never engage in a word war against those who buy ink by the barrel. Frankly, my voice is small and largely unheard anymore, mainly because those who are wielding the word sword have most of the ink, i.e., media attention and sympathy. My words, my cause, has little support anymore. It was not always so.

I am not foolish enough to try to counter each detail of the hundreds of pages of detailed attacks against those who were my associates and friends written by Mr Cuhulain in his “Witch Hunt” series. He is obviously a very bright man. He is a man of many words. I am just a man with experience. A clever wordsmith can take any subject and make it persuasively look any way he wants - especially if the readers are not able to wade through the volumes of information written. And most people, daunted by the sheer volume of information, simply conclude he must be correct. Who has the time to wade through the details to separate facts from opinions? I don't. Unfortunately, the right answers are simple, not complex and wordy. I would not win an intellectual battle with Kerr. I would not try. And the disadvantage of being a man of experiences is the constant accusation of just being a factless crusader, whether I have facts or not. It's so interesting; I am dismissed because I happen to be an evangelical Christian who happens to know a lot about occult crimes. My faith, whether it is written EXPRESSLY or not, by implication disqualifies me? Hey, I may believe in Jesus as the Son of God, but at least I don't believe in fairies. I have never discredited a professional cop or otherwise just because they may be a Wiccan. My standard has always been, Can they do the job? I am not granted that same professional consideration.

So rather than go over each and every well-worn minutiae detailed in Kerr's “Witch Hunts”, I will just answer some of his comments and questions directed at me in his recent posting, attempt one more time to share what I have experienced and what I know about the occult crimes Kerr thinks nonexistent, and then I'm done. For good. Dialoging over.

Recently, I was ambushed over the phone by people who wanted to “interview” me on my law enforcement work and turned out to be Church of Satan, Indiana folks. I began answering the questions until the questions got hostile, then vile - then I terminated the call, only learning later who these people were. I don't get paid enough to deal with sleazy, deceptive nonsense like that. But I remembered one of the tired old attacks they parroted: “Where's the proof? If there's satanic crime, PROVE IT!”

To them? Why should I? To Kerr? To numerous “witch hunt” clubs bent on disproving ANY real occult crime? Give me one good sane reason to put real cases in the hands of people so blinded by their own personal religious agenda that they are incapable of objective investigation.

Before I answer, ONE MORE TIME, I want to tackle a few things Kerr put in his article concerning our e-mail exchange. Apparently, he saw that my article on ritual abuse had been posted at Jesus Messiah Fellowship's website. According to Kerr, “Reid classifies himself as a `Certified expert on Satanic Ritual Abuse and Occult Crimes.' Reid doesn't say who certified him.”

That's because, Kerr, I didn't say it. I did not see the posting on JMF's website, and as of tonight, it was not accessible. Please provide proof that “I” said I was certified. Perhaps the JMF people said I was; an honest mistake if it was there, but I DID NOT say I was a certified expert. I have NEVER claimed to be a “certified expert.” In fact, I have always said that someone who claims to be an expert in this needs to be watched out for. There are no “experts” - the field is just too vast and complex to claim that kind of grandiose title. I HAVE taught over 250 criminal justice classes on occult crimes, as well as crimes against children. I have a doctorate in Divinity. No one who called me to do classes asked if I was “certified.” All they cared about is did I know my stuff. And I guess I did in part, because that's a heck of a lot of classes to be contracted for if you're a quack, isn't it? In Texas law enforcement, word of mouth goes a long way. If I didn't have the stuff, I wouldn't have been working steadily as a criminal justice educator for 15 years. Does that make me a “certified expert?” No. I didn't claim it, and unless you can PROVE that “I” said it, Kerr, you need to remove it from your website. If you can't get THAT little fact straight, what else should we question about your volumes of stuff? I remind you that you were saying Pat Pulling (B.A.D.D.) was going around the country spreading her stuff until I pointed out to you that unless she was channeling her classes from beyond the grave, it was unlikely, since she died several years ago. Do you have a fact-checker? Should we do it for you? Really, Kerr - how much of your stuff should people trust if you can't get the little facts right? Tell you what - I'll give you my VERIFIABLE facts, when you stop putting out stuff that is full of holes. Deal?

I had written that “False Memory Syndrome” is just theory, not recognized by the DSM. You said, “The diagnosis of repressed memories which forms the belief in Satanic Ritual Abuse is just a theory too, Greg.”

This is a man who has obviously not spent too much time with violent trauma victims or Vietnam vets. I will never forget counseling a postal worker who was emotionally dead and on the verge of divorce because he was so numb. In the course of our first session, he went into a complete memory recall (which he had almost completely repressed) and for the next hour, weeping and hysterical, relived the brutal day they were ambushed and he watched his best friend get his head blown off inches away from him. I didn't “implant false memories.” I didn't even know he'd seen combat.

How about talking to some violent trauma therapists or Vet counselors before you say it's “theory?”

Kerr says the whole Ritual Abuse thing was a “shared network that is the common denominator in these cases…the network of therapists and rescue ministry workers who believe International Satanic Conspiracies.”

Stop. I never heard more than ONE therapist say they believed in “International Satanic Conspiracies.”

Kerr goes on to say, “These people bring prospective patients in and then use various techniques to implant the false memories.”

Okay, Kerr - put in on the line. WHAT TECHNIQUES? Just how DOES one “implant” a false memory? Let me know, so when I find a therapist who's got the technique, I can avoid them. I never met one.

Kerr then excerpts from my article where I speak of a nurse who had told us about a satanic murder that never made the papers. Kerr says, “Note how Reid gives us this anecdote but fails to give us details like the Nurse's name that would allow us to verify the story. He says these cases will never make the paper but doesn't supply an explanation as to why. Perhaps Reid wants us to infer that Satanists within the system are suppressing these stories?”

Did I SAY that, Kerr? Really. That's a pretty cheap attempt to bag me in with the “Conspiracy” bunch, isn't it? As to details, well, it was 1987, at Beaumont Army Hospital in a joint workshop on occult crimes with legendary FBI profiler Van McDonald. Every single attendee was a professional. The nurse had a long career in the medical field, and now in the Army Medical corps. And no, I can't give you her name, because I wasn't taking notes then. (More on that later.) But the conversation HAPPENED, in front of about 100 professionals.

I do not know why it was not in the paper. Perhaps it had been, I didn't check - but any good cop if he knows his stuff, unless it's absolutely necessary, will withhold ANY details about any ritual aspects or connections. Or didn't you take that class? You know; public hysteria, media meddling and sensationalism, keeping religious stuff out of courts?

Kerr goes on to say, “Sooner or later people defect and spill the beans. So far the numerous people who have claimed to be defectors (who all claimed to be leaders, did you notice?) have all turned out to be frauds.”

One word, Kerr. OMERTA. Check it out in the Mafia dictionary.

Defectors usually die if they tell. Unfortunately, those who do defect stand little chance of even being heard now, yes, partly because of a few frauds, but mainly because of you and your friends. For the record, most of the defectors I've debriefed didn't claim to be much of a player at all.

I also said in the article, “Numerous authorities have received death threats to back off investigations.” You said, “If this is true, why doesn't Reid name just one? He doesn't name the investigator who died in the suspicious plane crash or give us any other details which would allow us to verify this claim.”

I honestly feel like I'm dealing with a self-appointed court. Who certified YOU to be the “verifier?” But I digress….

Okay. I give in. Gary Cardori. You do the homework, Kerr.

Kerr continues, “The truth is that the agencies who employ these “Investigators of Satanic Crime” are getting tired of these people going off on pointless personal religious crusades that cost thousands of taxpayer dollars and produce nothing.” Sounds like you have a list of said agencies. Are you their new spokesman on the issue? And, there you go again: It's all personal religious crusades. Isn't your Witch Hunt series a personal religious crusade? There were NUMEROUS reasons why certain task forces were dismantled. In one case, Sgt. Stan Ferguson of the Ft Worth PD, was told to let it go because gang problems were an overwhelming issue that demanded full attention. (He'd garnered a whole warehouse of satanic paraphernalia taken as evidence in crimes.) Of all the people I've worked with, NONE were demoted, fired or reassigned because “it was a waste of money.”

I went on to detail my own death threats, etc., including a threat in a public class by a military officer, who told me in front of over 50 Federal Probation officers, “Keep your mouth shut about this!”

Kerr says, “Why aren't the people who threatened you in court, Greg?” No Kerr, I do NOT know the identity of the military man who demanded my silence, and neither does anyone else, as he showed up 10 minutes before my class ended and left before it was over. I asked everyone I could who he was; no one knew. As to other threats, well, the last one DID end up in court, a few months after the man called and told me he was going to “Blow my brains out” that night. But it wasn't for that, although he did show up at a public function and would have done it if I hadn't had some guys running interference for me. He was arrested a few months later for taking a cache of weapons into a convenience store determined to kill everybody. And he is a devil worshipper.

Now back to why I am not real fond of the idea of coming up with “proof” for these people, whether they are Church of Satan folks, Wiccans Wiccan cops or would-be Christian journalists with a thirst for exposing people. I attempted this years ago. I pointed to case after case of occult crime or homicide. The reactions got to be predictable and maddening:

It wasn't occultic

It was just a crazy person

It was an isolated incident.

This is what ticks me off. I have worked hard to provide training so investigators can recognize a real occult crime, because it goes to motive as well as possibly leading to other perpetrators. In the process I have been brought in on a number of cases, some which were closed, some active, where the occult was clearly a factor in motive and method.

I never thought I'd be pressured to “prove” it happened. After over 250 criminal justice classes, I can count on two hands those that said, “This is bunk.” (Most of those were Wiccans and occultists anyway.) Cops, who are inbred skeptics, merely shook their heads, took notes, and rushed home to hug their kids. A few walked out because the images and material was so disturbing. I stuck to the facts and was rewarded with the knowledge that good people now had some strong tools to help them tackle the underworld criminals if and when they emerged.

Granted, this is a special area - like DNA - like blood spatter analysis - like psychological profiling - it was a part of an arsenal of tools they needed. Occult crimes weren't every day. But not ONE class I ever taught passed without someone asking me to consult or just telling the class or me about an occult case they were working, or had handled in the past. Had I been aware that the naysayers would soon demand proof, I would have kept every note and every number of every professional with an occult crime in their files. But I wasn't doing it for the media, certainly not for the skeptics. I was doing what I did for the people who had or would confront this, and I didn't even care if outsiders didn't believe it. I saw it. The fine men and women I trained saw it.

So why in the world would I want to “prove” anything to a bunch of skeptics who had already made up their minds, who were not cops, probation officers, therapists or any of the others I trained?

Still, I gave it a shot in 1997. I offered the brutal slaying of 13 year old David Cardenas by an occult-practicing gang in Donna, Texas. His feet had been chopped off, his blood was drained and the perpertrator drank his blood - all before he died. He was lain in the classic “North-South” position, used to “Draw power from hell.”

Not good enough. An educator from San Antonio pronounced the motive was not occult at all, just “simple robbery”. What did they do? Steal his Pokemon cards? Of course, this “educator” could pontificate her opinion with ease. Me, I just had the silly experience of being asked to consult with the investigators, brought on by officers I had trained  just months prior, who called me and said, “This is everything you trained us to look for.” (Bernie Garza and Javier Garcia, if you want to check.) No, I'm just a poor uneducated man who had the EXPERIENCE of standing - and weeping - at the very spot David died.

Tell me again. Why should I give you proof? You will ALWAYS find a reason to call it something other than what it clearly is - AN OCCULT CRIME.

Let me talk about the constant lumping me in the “conspiracy theory” bunch.

Patent nonsense.

Technically, a criminal conspiracy is when more than one person conspires to commit a crime. So yeah, based on a number of cases where more than one person who worshipped the devil or whatever conspired to commit a crime, I'm a conspiracy believer.

Why does that give you all a right to paint me with a broad brush along with the nutcases who believe the government knew about 9/11, that fluoride was a communist plot, that Elvis is still alive? Come on. You use “conspiracy theorist”, “Village folklore” and “Satanic panic” as little condescending dismissals that make it look like we're village idiots and enable you to just make any facts we MIGHT have disappear. And of course, any inconvenient facts are called something else. Cuhulain dismissed Michael Newton's well-researched and documented “Hell Raiser” as a book that “rehashes the urban legends about Satanism.” Another example of taking ANY occult crime and calling it “urban legend.” So what does it take to qualify as an occult crime, Kerr, especially since it is so evident they do not exist? How do you prove something to someone who refuses to even acknowledge the POSSIBILITY that there are those who are on the dark side who commit crimes?

I am not a conspiracist. I do not believe Satanists are some vast worldwide army that control the government. I do not believe every story I hear. Okay, Kerr?

A real investigator does not bring their own bias or assumptions to the table. Truth is the servant of no man. You look at the facts, put it through a battery of tests and criteria, and if it fits, then you don't candy-coat it and call it something else. Unfortunately, neither Kerr or the various and sundry Wiccan advocates and Church of Satan PR people who are bent only on DISPROVING occult crime have the objectivity to investigate rightly.

None of the cases that have come my way have escaped meticulous scrutiny. Dozens I tossed out right away. After all, how many “High Priests over thousands” can there be? A few more crumbled under a more intense light. Many stood the test. I don't give a rip if the perpetrator is a Satanist, a Wiccan or a Christian. Unlike so many of the occult defenders and Wiccan crusaders, I do not have a pre-programmed presumption. I wasn't out crusading to say, “Kids were NOT abused by priests! It's all village folklore, false memories!” just because I'm a Christian. Heck no. LET them go to jail. Even though, in many of the cases, there was little or no physical evidence, just the testimony of the victims, and a few were even based on repressed memories! I know how the code of silence works with victims, and I believed most of these cases were credible based on what I had heard, and how I know perpetrators work. Just because I'm a Christian, I had no intention of accusing the victims of making up stories because the accused was “one of us.” I did not have any compulsion to rush to the accused's defense. It's called “objectivity.”

Kerr and friends, with the battle cry, “Never again the burning times!”, just set out to call ritual abuse victims frauds, accuse therapists of implanting false memories, and discredit anyone who had actually worked in investigating these crimes as just “religious fanatics.”

Hey Kerr - where were you during the Catholic priest scandals??? I'm sure the defense teams could have used your tireless, meticulous scrutiny to dig up dirt on the investigators, scream “Where's the proof?” and make all the victims look delusional and fraudulent. Where the heck were you? Oh, yeah - you were too busy trying to prevent “the burning times.”

While we're here, let's discuss the “burning times”. Salem first. Now, let's see - you had a slave girl who indoctrinated some girls into the occult. (Talk about a conspiracy!) But when the girls were brought to trial, who was accused of being a witch and burned at the stake? Mostly, CHRISTIANS. Maybe a handful of real witches did, but our body count was much higher - all because of lying occultists!

Now, how about the medieval burnings? I am sorry about the few of your folks that got killed - but I am a Christian, AND a Jew by blood, and frankly, I resent you shanghai-ing the inquisition for your own cause. More Jews were slaughtered in the inquisition for “witchcraft” than all the real witches who ever LIVED. So, get over it. Quit revising history already. We don't need spin witches right now.

By the way, none of my close associates, many of whom you assailed in your “Witch Hunts” (the title which makes me wonder who is hunting who) were trying to arrest witches. Maybe a few fringers out there did. I never associated with them. Most of my friends knew the difference between crime and religious practices.

I was in Copperas Cove, Texas a few years ago and was doing a two-day presentation for Central Texas Council of Governments.

In attendance was a Baptist preacher who had caused a real firestorm with his inflammatory - and FALSE - media statements regarding Wiccans at Ft. Hood. Anyone who attended would tell you that I took GREAT pains to correct his information and keep him from creating a pulpit in my classroom. I refused to let him take a crime class and turn it into a religious forum.

After the class, a former LAPD officer, a Wiccan priestess, came up to me. She told me, “I didn't know what to expect when I signed up. After seeing your class, I think maybe our groups need to make sure we don't have any of this hiding in our backyards.” Now THERE is a Wiccan I can respect and work with! All I've ever done is say, “Look at what I've got. If you don't see it out there, great. If you do, now you know what it is and how to proceed.”

A few days later, a Wiccan who is married to one of the High Priestesses in that area called Central Texas Council of Governments and went ballistic. He threatened to sue them, sue me, make sure I never did another class in Texas. Why? He was “tired of fundamentalist nuts” teaching government classes.

I called him, listened to his angry tirade. Then I asked him if he had been to my class. He had not. (Only one of my critics in all these years, as far as I know, had actually ATTENDED my class, and he was a self-proclaimed “Druid Wiccan”.) He said some friends of his had told him about it. I doubt they'd been there either. He couldn't/wouldn't name them. I told him there were over 100 officers there who would be more than happy to testify that I did not bring up religion - mine specifically - ONCE in 16 hours of training.

But to heck with the facts, right? I've been labeled a fundamentalist, so that disqualifies me. We used to call that religious discrimination. Oh, I forgot. That applies to everyone BUT Christians these days. We're fair game, no?

One of your compatriots in Texas figured he'd give me a go, too. He wrote some folks to let them know he'd “had to clean up after several of Reid's law enforcement classes.” He said I was “pretty much under control now” by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education who “no longer certify his classes” and “nullified CEU's” from previous classes. ( I spoke to someone at the Commission who assured me they do NOT “nullify” CEU's already given.) He goes on to say that I am a licensed Private Investigator (Actually, I am retired from that) and that P.I.'s are “pretty much a joke” among law enforcement in Texas. He stated that he had “lost patience” with me when I supposedly made a comment on my website referring to Special Agent Kenneth Lanning as a “bumbling idiot.” For the record, I NEVER said that; I may disagree vehemently with Mr. Lanning, but I am not crass enough to call him a bumbling idiot. In fact, I don't think I've ever USED the word “bumbling.” But, conveniently, he said “the comment has since disappeared, but the pathologic mentality that led to it has not.” So let me see if I have this straight. He claims that he was responsible for “cleaning up” after me, mocks my legitimate job as a P.I., accuses me of saying something on my website I never said and he cannot prove, then refers to my mentality as “pathologic.” Even though I smell a lawsuit for slander and loss of income, what REALLY bothers me is that, true to the others like Kerr that are on this crusade, they can say what they want to, ridicule who they want to, make up what they want to and do so with impunity because no one ever challenges them. And Kerr says I don't have the facts? Well, I have yet to see one of these folks be accountable for THEIR errors, mistakes, or even downright fabrications.

And while the Texas Wiccan who was determined to ruin my career and whoever else is busy trying to get me out of work because of my religious beliefs, I attended a Region 19 educational conference in El Paso (A government, taxpayer paid event) where the keynote speaker was a Curandera! Hello, what's wrong with this picture? I do NOT push my religion on my classes, yet I am repeatedly slurred and dismissed by those who have never even attended one of my classes! But alternative religion speakers are invited as keynote speakers, lauded, and guess what - not a WHISPER of protest from my pagan friends. PLEASE explain this kind of hypocrisy to me.

Before my last Central Texas training, a local Wiccan/Druid police officer got wind of it and wrote an e-mail that went like wildfire across the Wiccan network, warning them that the evil Dr. Reid was coming back to create chaos for them. It got all the way to a Wiccan High Priestess on the other side of the country. She was concerned, if what this guy was saying was right. Thankfully, she contacted an associate of mine who assured her it was not. I wrote to her, explained who I was and what I did. She was relieved, and sent out an e-mail to put out the fire. I was grateful. Again, she is a Wiccan I can respect. OBJECTIVE.

You can't dismiss all we did, and saw, and lived through with spin witch revisionist history.

You can revise McMartin history, but you can't change the fact that most of the evidence was never allowed in court - not the least of which was the fact that of the 389 children interviewed who claimed sexual abuse, 80% of them had physical evidence of abuse, and a great number of them suffered with chlamydia. The fact that the tunnels the children claimed were under the property were in fact verified by a post-trial archeological dig doesn't seem to matter now. Nor does it matter to the people who gleefully claim McMartin was a fraud that I KNEW some of the parents, and have continued to get e-mails from now full grown adults who suffered at McMartin, and continue to suffer horrifically to this day from the memories of their abuse. Oh, I forgot. No proof. Just my experience.

Kerr seems to believe all the therapists and others got together and had this “shared network” whereby everyone just made up stories because someone else had one, and that somehow therapists had this mysterious power to implant false memories. Hey, I was THERE, Kerr - didn't happen that way. I will concede that some of the original investigators on McMartin used leading questions; I will also concede that several years later, there was a degree of cross-contamination of survivor stories. But of the original therapists I spoke to or worked with, NONE had ever seen this kind of abuse before, NONE had read any books about it, and NONE had gone to some mysterious “shared network.” There WAS none when the spontaneous outcries took place in dozens of schools and daycares across the country.

Check out the YMCA daycare case in El Paso if you want. There were convictions in round one - good ones. Then it was overturned on a technicality and retried. All but a few of the original parents allowed their children to testify. Why? Because of the brutal treatment the children suffered under the original defense team during the trial. And after the convictions, the parents told their children, “It's ok now, you're safe. These people will never be able to hurt you again. They're in jail for life.” Wrong. How could they tell their kids, “They may get out of jail again if you don't go back to court and tell them what happened - again.” Most parents said, “Forget it.” The courts failed them. They weren't going to put their kids through that nightmare again.

So the retrial ended up in acquittals, because only two of the original children came back to testify. The prosecution failed partly because they were told, “Just get this off the docket. It's already cost too much money.” So they let the convictions be overturned without a fight. I was AT the trial, by the way. I watched the judge snooze on and off. I watched the prosecutors NOT try the case, and I watched the accused abuser make fun of the children and make ugly faces at them and no one did a thing. I also met some of the children, and listened to several parents tell the horrible stories of how their children came home from daycare altered, sexualized, tranced-out, and terrified. None of them had even told the others until they had gone to the police with each separate child's allegations. The things the kids said gave ME nightmares.

And if it was all made up, please explain to me why, years after the perps were let go, did I get a call from the mother one of the children - to tell me they had taken her son to the park to get their pictures taken for the Little League team, and when the photographer showed up, her now middle school boy scrambled up a tree, hysterically screaming, “Mommy, that's the man who took the bad pictures!” Maybe he was trying to get on Jerry Springer? I'd give you the lady's name, but I'm not doing anyone's homework on these cases. You can dig if you want, not that any of the victims I know would get within a hundred miles of you, knowing where you stand. All of the parents and children in the dozens of cases I have been involved with over the years have all been betrayed by the justice system, the False Memory Syndrome cartel, and a bunch of self-styled “Village Folklore” debunkers, and all these people want to do is forget it happened and try and get a pathetic scrap of life back. That's why what you do makes me so angry, Kerr. You know NONE of the people I have known, worked with, you know none of the children I had walked with, held, cried with, none of the parents that gave up everything to protect their children, only to have their little ones returned to their perpetrators. It's so easy for you to sit behind a keyboard and just type, type, type. Again, you have lots of words, but it's all clinical, analytical bushwah. You can never know the pain you cause, or the pain you ADD to all those who are still suffering from ritual trauma and sexual assault by occult monsters.

I will not defend my defense of Lauren Stratford to you or anybody. She was closer than family and seeing her attacked is like seeing my own flesh and blood vilified. Maybe someday, when several of us combine the volumes of information on the ugly people who destroyed her life, I'll say more. Suffice it to say that it said everything to me that after Lauren was publicly disgraced, THERE WAS ANOTHER. A relative who verified everything Lauren said about her abuse from her family, because she suffered the same, and had even gotten a protective order to keep Lauren's family away from her son - all this before she even read Lauren's book. And NONE of the people who brought Lauren down were even the slightest interested in hearing or verifying her story. Who's the fraud, really? Lauren, or people who are more than happy to take someone down but refuse to really look at evidence?

FYI, Kerr, Lauren's name was LAUREL Wilson, not Lauren. Just trying to help you to continue to get your numerous inaccuracies straightened out. You're welcome.

As to the numerous other people you discredited in your public polemic, just this: Did you ever talk with or meet or know Mike Warnke? Dale Griffis? Pat Pulling? Sue Joyner? Larry Jones? Alan Peterson? Any of them? No? I thought not. Did you ever approach them and say, “Hey I am willing to look at what you have?” Of course not. Solomon said, “One person's story seems true until the other side is examined. Get all the facts first.” Did you? No, you did not.

Just like Special Agent Ken Lanning. “Come on down”, I wrote. “I'll open my files to you.” Not interested I guess. I assume he's already made up his mind.

You want “proof”? Okay, but you do the homework. Shane Stewart & Sally McNeely, San Angelo Texas, about 1989. Brutally murdered, feet cut off, baby cut out of her womb. A satanic gang was highly suspected, but there wasn't enough evidence - but no one I spoke to in law enforcement had any doubt it was them. They're the ones that recruited them before they killed them.

Carmen Khron, Odessa Texas, 1981 - brutally butchered after being kidnapped. Two men arrested on separate charges a couple of years later, and the younger one confessed that he was there when his older partner killed her. He did it to elevate his high priest ranking, he said. The police kept the older one and released the younger, ordering him to come back the next day. The man would be glad to corroborate all this, but he walked out of the station, across the street, put his head under a pumpjack and killed himself. Omerta. He broke the oath. Check that oath out, Kerr. The alleged perp, by the way, is alive and well because the DA said, “Just get him out of town. I'm not dealing with this Satanist crap.”

Y'all did a good job at discounting any possibility of occultic involvement in the West Memphis murders, a good chance for you to trash my buddy Dale Griffis. But did you see the crime photos, Kerr? I did. Someone killed those kids, obviously. As to the Wiccan poster boy, Damien Echols, he's really played you all like a master. While he's using the Wiccan community to raise money for his retrial, he's also stroking a prison chaplain with his born-again testimony. And you think he's believable? We may never know, because there's been so much confusion brought about by the occult community trying to get a piece of this pie on Damien's behalf, there's not much chance of doing a legitimate analysis of the case. All I know is I faxed the coroner when the murder took place and said, “Is this what I think it is?” It is, he replied. The coroner's word means a whole lot more to me than Damien's, or yours, or anyone else's.

I could go on. Many cases, as I said, I can't go back to because I wasn't keeping notes for you - like the Pecos Judge that leaned over to me after lunch during the training break and said, “Son, they've been sending bodies with those occult symbols down the river to me for years. I just didn't know what they meant until today.”

Or the veteran cop who told me a Church of Satan member had moved into town, got a trailer, blackened his windows, and had a steady stream of hookers and other women coming in and out of his trailer. Then one day he completely disappeared - the day they found a Black-Dahlia style corpse with no blood right in the center of town. Sorry, can't recall his name. Wasn't keeping notes for you. Didn't think I'd have to prove anything.

And the children - well, I've got a box full of files on children who outcried. Two cases went to court that I was personally involved with. One boy had been sodomized, rented for sex by his occultist stepdad. The hospital had documented the rapes. We got right up to pretrial, and the mother returned to the stepdad - and the boy said on the stand, “Nothing happened. I made it all up.” I wasn't surprised; he told me his stepdad told him if he ever talked, he'd kill his mom and sell him in Mexico. The DA and attorneys were devastated. One left town and told me, “I can't work for a system that keeps failing our kids.”

The other case was in court, when someone paid the mother's attorney to attend a weekend false memory conference in Las Vegas. The attorney recused himself that Monday, telling the mother, “I don't believe your son anymore.” And the boy was returned to his alleged abusive occult loving father.

I don't count these things in facts, but in heartaches, devastations, destroyed little lives. And thanks to the False Memory folks and all of you who care more about your version of things and your agenda than looking at these cases OBJECTIVELY, a lot of damage has been done.

A hundred or more inside stories - just from me. How many from the rest of the people you dismissed, Kerr? We'll never know. You have a loud, persuasive voice and not many people are willing to even listen anymore.

You might fish around the David Parker Ray case in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He tortured women for years, took videos of them. His trailer of torture had a sign on the inside, “Satan's Toybox.” His original comment to authorities was that he was a Satanist, and he made videos for his group's entertainment. You won't get a lot of that from the papers. To get that, you have to be someone like me, who actually talked to investigators. But, Parker's dead. So is the original judge. So is the star witness. Go figure.

Maybe I came by all this early - at least, honestly. One of my closest grade school friends, Danny Townsend, a terribly abused child - was convicted of a brutal rape murder for Satan in 1972. I would love to talk with him, but the warden told me he was the most dangerous inmate in their custody. Feel free to go back and rewrite the story on that case.

Regardless. At least I can say my “agenda” is born out of an honest desire to protect the innocent, especially children, as it was with ALL of my friends you decided to write about and dismiss.

At least I have kept my own religious agenda from affecting the objectivity necessary to stop the injury of children.

And you? I think it's all about revisionist history and trying to prevent the recurrence of the miniscule (and largely speculative) “burning times”, and the desire to completely eliminate any voice that would dare claim ritual crime is real.

I AM a man of facts and always have been. You have merely attacked people's character and careers.

The truth, as I said, is no man's servant.

And that truth will be made clear in the end.

Dr Gregory Reid