Patrick Figured was accused of engaging in satanic rituals in which he wore a mask and a dark cloak, lit candles and burned Bibles. He supposedly told his young victims that he did not believe in God. The record shows the children claimed that Figured sodomized them with a screwdriver and forced them to drink dog’s urine and human blood.

Figured was an electronics company executive who was separated from his second wife while having a relationship with his former secretary, Sonya Hill. Hill lived in Smithfield, North Carolina with her mother, Polly Byrd, who ran an unlicensed daycare in her home, a rancher with a large yard in the countryside, a perfect place for little kids to run around. Two-year-old Mattie Blackstone went to “Granny Polly’s” along with her brother Jeremy and another little boy named Zeke Hughes. Figured often visited his girlfriend and her daughter there.

Figured fell under suspicion when two-year-old Mattie developed a vaginal infection. After being given a physical exam, Mattie was questioned by a social worker named Nancy Berson. Berson was a believer in the existence of satanic ritual abuse. She was aware of the allegations sweeping across the country that there were secret satanic covens who preyed on little children.

Satanic panic -- medieval superstition
causing untold tragedy today

In November, 1988, Berson interviewed Mattie, Zeke and Jeremy and repeatedly questioned them about what had happened at Granny Polly’s house. According to Figured’s appeal lawyer, Nancy Berson acknowledged at trial that she asked Mattie if “Pat” had hurt her and repeatedly asked leading and suggestive questions. In other words, it was she who introduced the idea of “Pat” being the attacker before any accusation was made. When she first interviewed five-year-old Jeremy, he told her he was afraid of his father. She asked him if he was afraid of anyone at Granny Polly’s. Berson believed that children needed to be prompted and pressured to “disclose” the dark secrets they kept locked up inside. According to court documents:

Ms. Berson asked [Jeremy] if the defendant wore a costume or a mask. She asked him about the devil, and about candles. She asked him about singing or chanting. She was interested in finding out if the children had been involved in Satanic ritual. She claimed to have had "previous experience" with such matters. She asked questions designed to elicit information about ritualistic abuse, Satanic symbols, etc.

(Nancy Berson declined to be interviewed by Imaginary Crimes, citing confidentiality issues.)

Except for one taped session with a child psychologist, there were no tapes or videotapes made of the child interviews, a matter which has proven crucial to the defense in similar cases, such as the McMartin family of California and Bernard Baran of Massachusetts. These tapes have revealed how very young children were pressured to make accusations, and were questioned repeatedly, their interrogators refusing to take “no” for an answer.

Figured had originally agreed to enter an “Alford Plea,” in exchange for an agreement that all charges would be dropped against his girlfriend Sonya Hill. Essentially, an Alford Plea means that the defendant will be treated by the court as guilty without actually having admitted guilt.

But the prosecution broke its word, and Hill was charged anyway.

While Figured was awaiting trial, another and even more sensational ritual abuse trial took place– the prosecution of Robert Kelly and six others for abuse at Little Rascals daycare in Edenton, North Carolina.

In April 1992, Robert Kelly was convicted of 99 charges of rape and sentenced to 12 consecutive life terms. The same month, Patrick Figured asked the court to withdraw his Alford plea and substituted a plea of “not guilty.”

The Trial
At trial, Polly Byrd testified that she had never left the children in her care alone with Figured. But the appeals court ruled that Figured could not provide “an ironclad alibi” for every moment of his whereabouts during the months of June to October, 1980. Therefore he could have attacked the three children. Sonya Hill also denied that her boyfriend had done anything wrong, but the children accused her of being Figured’s accomplice in the satanic rituals, so her word was worse than useless.

Patrick Figured: "I have learned one thing in here; they can't do anymore to me than they have... I have lost everything as it is.."
Figured has taken numerous courses while in prison; he currently works as a teacher's aide

The trial, cont'd.
After several years of repetitive questioning -- called “therapy” – in which the young children were repeatedly forced to discuss what Pat Figured had done to them, the children testified at his trial in the fall of 1992. Zeke, just two years old at the time of the supposed attacks, testified that the defendant wore a mask with spiders and snakes on it. Jeremy said Figured made a dog “pee” and forced the children to drink it, and had whipped him and forced him to engage in sexual activities. Figured had dressed up like the Devil and burned a Bible. Sonya Hill had taken pornographic photos and videos of them. No pornographic material was ever found. But the jurors in Figured’s case found the accusations to be credible.

"It was the fact that they were children," Jury foreman Michael Lynch told the Raleigh News & Observer. “Children couldn't make up the things they were testifying to." The evidence suggests, however, that they were supplied with hints and suggestions by an over-zealous therapist. As is typical in cases of this sort, the children’s accusations included the use of “poo” and “pee,” which are the dirtiest things children know. Animal abuse and the making of pornography also figures prominently in other cases. 

Figured was sentenced to three consecutive, or back-to-back, life terms. (His sentence was reduced to one life term in 1996).

Jeremy and Mattie’s parents sued Polly Byrd and Sonya Hill and won a judgment of 10.5 million dollars, an amount the family was in no position to pay. Hill was sentenced to ten years in prison for her role as Figured’s satanic accomplice.

Figured’s appeal was denied in August 1994, the Court of Appeals of North Carolina finding “no reversible error” in Figured’s conviction.

Discredited medical evidence
The appeals court judges also noted that there was “overwhelming medical evidence [at trial] which was uncontroverted by the defendant.” So what was this evidence? Dr. Karen Sue St. Claire had testified while Mattie’s vaginal examination was normal, her anus, when lightly touched, opened rapidly. Another prosecution expert, Marci Herman-Giddens, testified that Zeke’s “anal muscle would open and close intermittently.” This phenomenon is known as “anal winking” and at the time of Figured’s trial some considered it to be an indicator of sexual abuse. As Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker explain in Satan’s Silence, their book about the satanic child abuse panic, physician Bruce Woodling published an influential article about the “anal wink test” in 1981 in a prestigious medical journal. He diagnosed children in the notorious Bakersfield sex ring trials and McMartin day care trials.

In Britain, dozens of children were apprehended from their parents on the basis of the anal wink test. But by 1989, researchers had discredited the anal wink test. They discovered that the anuses of non-abused children also “winked” – it was a reflex reaction of no particular significance.

The other piece of “overwhelming medical evidence” was that the children’s anuses showed areas of skin that were “a different color than normal, indicating an area that had been hurt and was in the process of healing.” “Hurt” in this case meant that Figured had supposedly lacerated the children’s rectums with a screwdriver, an act which would have caused intense pain and severe bleeding. Yet no one noticed any injuries at the time.

The children’s parents testified that, looking back on things, their children had acted abnormally that summer, one had developed a stutter, another seemed lethargic, but no one reported that the children had bled copiously from their bottoms. Nevertheless, Herman-Gidden’s testimony satisfied the court.

Therapists who worked with the children also testified that their behavior and statements confirmed that they had been abused. (One expert, psychologist Mark Everson, also testified for the prosecution in the Little Rascals case.) Evidently, the jury was not awakened to the very real possibility that the memories of abuse had been implanted in the children by the gross malpractice of the professional “true believers” who warped the young children’s minds with questions about the depraved things that “Pat” had done to them.

Perhaps one day tourists will flock to the site of Granny Polly’s house to buy tarot cards, witch hats, and crystals, as they do in Salem. Perhaps there will be a memorial to Pat Figured and Sonya Hill, like the memorial to Martha Carrier and the other Salem citizens condemned as witches.

But in the meantime Figured sits in prison, held without hope of parole.