"The house in which Carol grew up has mauve and dark-red rooms that are shadow-struck and decorated with golden candlestick holders, old family portraits and statues of dogs, birds and deer. Today Joseph sits glowering in the lounge, his patriarch's hands gripping his armchair. Kevin – a softer presence – informs me that Richard's at work, and Anthony's too distraught to speak. Their mother, Joan, passed away last year. David's here, though, friendly yet possessed of an anxious, wiry tension. Over the coming hours, he'll answer questions with flumes of facts and furious analysis, fossicking in boxes for the relevant document to illustrate his point.For these men, Carol's life is as much a mystery as her death. She had been a friendly, bolshy and academically successful teenager, who loved watching MAS*H and wearing the tartan shorts beloved of her favourite band, the Bay City Rollers. She was popular at school and had a noted instinct for caring, going out of her way to play with Michael, the neighbour with Down's syndrome, and paying regular visits to a lonely old man down the road known as Mr Partridge. At 15 she got a weekend job in a home for the disabled. At 21 she qualified as a nurse at Stockport College and rented a nearby flat, making frequent visits back home to borrow milk and money, and sunbathe in the garden. And then, in the mid-1980s, there began a silent drift away from the family."--the GuardianCarol's name is sometimes spelled Carole and it's unclear which is the correct spelling"Carol was hypnotized, sedated and brainwashed. Her childhood memories were eradicated and her mind was reordered. Carol was assigned a new identity, separated from her family, and a myth was created which helped stoke the entire Satanic Abuse panic in the United Kingdom. Out of the blue, in 2005, Carol phoned her brother and said she wanted to return home. One week later she died in mysterious circumstances."(from an Amazon summary of the book "Justice for Carol: The True Story of Carol Felstead: The Creation of a Satanic Myth in the United Kingdom")I learned about this poor woman from the podcast "Behind the Bastards"---an episode about the "Satanic Panic" that swept the US and England in the late 70's and 80's.This is a topic of some personal interest for me as I was in a fundamentalist cult during that period as a child and my parents believed things like Dungeons and Dragons were Satanic and other things that seem very outlandish now. My previous contributions to this sub have been a bit more on the art and mysterious object side, but this case speaks to me on a personal level because my own parents got partly caught up in this belief system.What was the "Satanic Panic"?Vox magazine describes it:"Most people, if they know of the Satanic Panic, know of it due to satanic ritual abuse, a rash of false allegations made against daycare centers in the ’80s. But there are lots of threads that contribute to Satanic Panic, and they can be seen running through a handful of recent social and cultural events.At its core, satanic ritual abuse claims relied on overzealous law enforcement, unsubstantiated statements from children, and above all, coercive and suggestive interrogation by therapists and prosecutors. Some of the defendants are still serving life sentences for crimes they probably didn’t commit—and most likely didn’t even happen in the first place."Why did Satanic Panic arise? There were several unique cultural and social factors that contributed to this horrible "perfect storm" type situation:Vox explains:"A number of factors contributed to the increased interest in, and fear of, the occult during the late 1960s and 1970s. The Manson cult’s operation in the late ‘60s culminated in a string of mass murders in the summer of 1969 that shocked the nation and put organized ritualistic killing on the brain.That same year, organist turned occultist Anton LaVey published his philosophical treatise The Satanic Bible, which plagiarized several sources and mostly regurgitated earlier philosophies of self-actualization and self-empowerment from writers like H.L. Mencken and Ayn Rand. Nevertheless, it became the seminal work of modern Satanism and the key text for the Church of Satan, a group LaVey had officially founded in 1966.Accompanying the rise of Satanism as a recognized practice was the 1971 publication of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel The Exorcist and its blockbuster 1973 film adaptation. With its claims of being based on a true story, The Exorcist profoundly impacted America’s collective psyche regarding the existence of demons, and single-handedly transformed the popular Ouija board from a fun, harmless parlor game into a malevolent device capable of inducing spirit possession, demonic infestation, or other paranormal activity."The magazine continues: "The growing fascination with the occult also coincided with the rise of a number of extremely well-publicized serial killing cases that took place in the ’70s: the Zodiac killer and the Alphabet Killer, both of whom utilized ritualistic patterns in their killings, neither of whom were ever caught; Ted Bundy; John Wayne Gacy; the Hillside Stranglers; and David Berkowitz, a.k.a. the Son of Sam, who sparked a mass panic during the summer of 1977 in New York City."The magazine also explains that during the 80's, several heretofore very rare child abduction cases made headlines. I recall my mom being terrified of the Adam Walsh case and tightening up her rules and watch of us. My mom was a SAHM but economic conditions at the time made it so that many families had to have two working parents. The rise of latchkey kids, and working moms created tension and worry around the family and the neighborhood didn't feel so safe anymore. Sprinkle in the return of Vietnam Vets who brought back heroin addictions and the release of mentally ill onto the streets/the tearing down and dismantling of the state mental hospital system and suddenly the streets are a very dangerous place.Vox magazine sums it up: "Although it was a time of economic growth and financial prosperity, the Reagan Era was also a time of unease centered on population growth, urbanization, and the rise of the double-income family model, which necessitated a sharp rise in the need for daycare services. As a result, anxiety about protecting the nuclear family from the unknown dangers of this new era was high: The ’80s saw the rise of AIDS scares, kidnap victims’ faces appearing on milk cartons, the mass panic surrounding the 1982 Tylenol murders, trick-or-treat scares (the nation’s lone Halloween candy killer, Ronald Clark O’Brien, received a highly publicized execution in 1984), and the first wave of reports of scary killer clowns attempting to prey on children.Each of these outbreaks of social unrest signaled Americans’ growing alarm over “stranger danger” and the fear that a terrifying, unknown evil could be lurking right around the corner."Anyway, how does Carol Myers factor into this?Carol was one of a group of children victimized (perhaps not purposefully) by overzealous therapists who believed in repressed memories of abuse.Carol made some shocking and sickening allegations. The English Newspaper the Sun details:"Carol Myers, 41, claimed to have had six babies after being ritually raped by members of the cult, all of which she said were then murdered at birth. She also claimed her mother Joan murdered her baby sister before setting fire to the family home in Stockport, Cheshire.But a police probe concluded that there was no evidence for any of the allegations, and her family firmly believe that Carol was brainwashed into believing false memories during controversial regression therapy. They claim Carol’s therapist declared herself ‘next of kin’ and booked the cremation, but didn’t tell the family.It was only after her death that the family were handed a “life assessment” document by the therapist, Dr Fleur Fisher, which made outrageous claims that parents Joseph and Joan ran a satanic abuse cult, that Carol had been impregnated by her father, and that her mother had murdered a baby sister, as well as letting the cult sacrifice another six babies born to Carol.Police cleared the couple and during a second inquest in 2015, Joseph Felstead told Westminster Coroner's Court that therapy had caused his daughter to believe the accusations."It's likely that Carol was either suffering from schizophrenia or was coached into revealing these false memories as a child or had them implanted by a well meaning but deeply misguided therapist.How and why did Carol die? Was she mentally ill and suffered some abuse of some kind? Was it all a lie? Was the therapist trying to cash in on the "trend" of horrific memoirs of abused children? A tragic end to a tragic mystery.The Guardian has a great long form article about this:https://ift.tt/3k7COwW the Vox article goes into a ton of details and is a great long read:https://ift.tt/2sKb6yZ via /r/UnresolvedMysteries https://ift.tt/32lMwpe
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