Forgotten Sins: A Real-Life American Horror Story

Of the many horror stories to emerge from the recovered memory, satanic ritual abuse and multiple personality disorder crazes that swept the United States in the 1980s and early ’90s, you will find few more bizarre than that of the Ingram family of Olympia, Washington. Forgotten Sins (1996), a telefilm adaptation of Remembering Satan, journalist Lawrence Wright’s chronicle of that convoluted case*, attempts to condense their troubling tale into 90 minutes and largely succeeds, no small task for subject matter this complex and disturbing.

John Shea stars as Matthew Bradshaw, an upstanding sheriff and fanatical Christian—Paul Ingram, his real-life counterpart, spoke in tongues at church—who feels an inexplicable emotional estrangement from his daughters. “Why can’t I be affectionate with them? I want to be,” he tells wife Bobbie (Bess Armstrong, worlds away from the glamour of Lace), who runs an in-home daycare center. She earnestly suggests he discuss it with their pastor, Reverend Newton (Gary Grubbs), whose smarmy paternalism leaves traces of oil on the screen.

Matthew isn’t the only one feeling the distance: 21-year-old Rebecca (Lisa Dean Ryan) resents his closeness to her mother and younger brother. At a religious retreat, she watches with detached curiosity as a trauma survivor shares her story and is lavished with support and affection. Before the weekend is through she’ll dramatically disclose abuse at the hands of her father, with impressionable teenage sister Laura (T.C. Warner) following suit. They decamp to the retreat organizer’s home as Bobbie reels and Matthew’s colleagues arrest him.

If this seems like a typical TV movie plot so far, remember that truth is stranger than fiction. As Wright explains in Remembering Satan, the Ingrams were steeped in a hysterical culture of religious fundamentalism at the height of the Satanic panic. They watched Geraldo Rivera’s blockbuster primetime special on devil worship and the elder Ingram daughter, who held sway over her sister, devoured books like the infamous Michelle Remembers. Soon, nearly the entire Ingram/Bradshaw family, Matthew foremost among them, has recovered (wildly improbable) memories of horrific ritual abuse.

“My girls are good girls, they’re Christian girls. They wouldn’t lie about this,” he tells the witless detectives (Dean Norris and Tim Quill) at the helm of the case. With help from Rev. Newton and an inept psychologist (Norman Large), they railroad and brainwash an unusually suggestible Matthew as only true believers could. Even as Rebecca’s pathological lies expand into human sacrifice territory, and as others within the police department are implicated in these imaginary crimes, few doubt her stories.

We breathe a sigh of relief when a frustrated prosecutor, having failed to obtain even a shred of physical evidence to help secure convictions, hires Dr. Richard Ofshe (William Devane) to conduct his own evaluation. Ofshe, a social psychologist and cult expert with “absolute credibility,” interviews the family, performs a few memory experiments on Matthew, and emerges confident of his innocence. “Rebecca Bradshaw remembers attending 850 cult meetings in 10 years—850 meetings! Yet she can’t remember a ritual chant or anything that’s on the altars,” he marvels.

Ofshe tries to explain to Matthew that his memories are false, but the disgraced lawman insists “God would not permit me to have a false memory.” His confessions to these crimes, made under astonishing duress, seal his fate within the legal system. There would be no exoneration in his future, as there was for the wrongfully convicted father in Fatal Memories. The daughter who tore her family apart would later appear on The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, defiantly sticking to her unbelievable story. Unmentioned in Forgotten Sins was another false accusation in her past.

Screenwriter T.S. Cook (The China Syndrome) had to judiciously prune quite a bit from Remembering Satan, eliminating the elder two Ingram sons and a couple of foster children entirely. It simplifies the story—as Wright mentions in his reporting, if there was any sort of sexual abuse in the Ingram household, might it have involved one (or both) of those brothers?—but keeps an already disjointed narrative more streamlined. Cook also reimagines Bobbie as someone generally more confident of the truth than the real Sandy Ingram.

Director Dick Lowry, who worked frequently with Kenny Rogers and made Meredith Baxter’s Betty Broderick films, spares us silly flashbacks or unnecessary suspense. Each member of the Bradshaw family succumbing to their own form of madness is frightening enough and Shea, Armstrong and Ryan do fine jobs with characters who are inscrutable even to themselves. But it’s Devane (For the Love of Nancy) who breaks through and good-naturedly delivers some much-needed sanity.

Additional Reading: Anyone interested in this case and others like it will want to check out Ofshe’s Making Monsters, cowritten with Ethan Watters, which explores the false memory phenomenon. I would also recommend “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement,” a 2022 op-ed that Watters wrote for the New York Times. And then there’s Cynthia Hanson’s 1998 Chicago Reader piece “Dangerous Therapy: The Story of Patricia Burgus and Multiple Personality Disorder,” which includes this startlingly funny passage:

“As I got off the medication and hypnosis, I started doing a little bit of math,” Pat says. “Two thousand people a year I was supposed to be eating. If I was doing this for 30 years, where were all the people coming from? We’re not talking about people being sucked out of the middle of New York City. We’re talking about Des Moines.”

Cynthia hanson, DANGEROUS THERAPY

*You can also find Parts I and II of Wright’s original New Yorker articles in the publication’s digital archives.

Streaming and DVD availability

Forgotten Sins hasn’t been released on DVD in North America, but it currently streams on Tubi and you can also find it on YouTube. Dead streaming links can be reported in the comments below.

^{Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.}

… But wait, there’s more!

Forgotten Sins opens with a game of poker hosted by Matthew for his fellow officers, which includes this dialogue: “All right, the name of the game is Follow the Queen. Follow the queens, gentlemen, follow the queens. Ladies control our fate in this game, in that respect a lot like life.” The character who speaks it later finds himself behind bars due to yarns spun by Rebecca, Laura and Matthew himself.

Here we should note that the dunderheaded Ingram investigation that forms the basis of Forgotten Sins was conducted almost entirely by men. It was their interference that caused things to spiral completely out of control. In a later scene, Ofshe compares recovered memory abuse allegations to the Salem witch trials but notes a reversal of its gender dynamics, an idea that Making Monsters explores in greater depth.