The Devil rides out

How the 1980s Satanic Panic started in Hull (part two)

8th March, 1988. The moment The Satanic Panic arrived in Hull.

Splashed across the front page of the Hull Daily Mail that day was a quite remarkable story.

In stark white capital letters on a black background, the headline said: “Satan’s Evil”.

Below it, a sub-headline added: “Black magic lures young to perverts.”

In the accompanying story, child abuse campaigner Dianne Core wasn’t talking about boxes of Black Magic chocolates.

Instead, she claimed her Childwatch group had discovered that children as young as eight were being forced to take part in Satanic rituals before being sexually abused by groups of men.

Some, she said, were drugged and tied upside down on giant cross before being subjected to sex acts. Some were made to drink blood.

According to Core, photographs were taken at each ritual and were used as blackmail to buy the boys’ silence.

“These children have been through absolute hell,” she added. “This is the most horrific case I have been involved in. It has made me ill.

“The human suffering they have caused is immeasurable. I have seen more suffering, hate and pain in the last few months than ever before.

“The effects are terrible. It just takes away their lives. They become like little zombies, living in permanent fear.

“These men are scum - the lowest of the low. If it takes me till the day I die, I will get them one by one.”

Strangely, no location for where all this horror was meant to be happening was included in the story.

There must have been a reason why the Longhill estate in East Hull wasn’t mentioned but I honestly can’t remember why.

However, there was another glaring omission in the story. There wasn’t the slightest shred of actual evidence put forward to support Core’s shocking claims.

Instead, she was given a prominent platform to say what she liked without challenge. While the story did refer to her comments as ‘claims’, the headlines presented them as facts.

Was any of it actually true? A casual reader might have assumed it was. A more cynical one would have certainly raised an eyebrow at other details included later in the story.

Core said she had first been alerted to the “black magic ring” six months earlier by a worried parent.

After Childwatch started investigating, she revealed they had been joined by “an American expert”.

The expert wasn’t named but Core spoke enthusiastically about how the issue was being tackled across the Atlantic.

“In America, the FBI is dealing with this sort of thing all the time,” she said.

In fact Core’s expert was Ted Gunderson, a former high-ranking FBI official who had previously headed the Bureau’s offices in Los Angeles, Dallas and Memphis.

By the time Childwatch brought him to Hull he’d long retired from the FBI and was working as a private investigator. He was also a fully-blown conspiracy theorist, convinced that Satanic cults were not only abusing and murdering hundreds of children in sacrificial ceremonies across America but were also part of a secret shadow government planning to take control of the United States.

Today there’s a wealth of material about Gunderson to be found online. As you might expect, some of it hurtles quickly down the same conspiratorial rabbit holes he mined decades ago.

Others, however, prefer to portray him as an increasingly paranoid far-right gun-for-hire peddling numerous unsubstantiated theories on a wide range of subjects, from the Japanese attack on the American fleet in Pearl Habour to the death of singer Sonny Bono in a skiing accident in 1998 (he claimed Cher’s ex-husband was murdered by a group of international arms dealers).

Fuelled by his own deep-rooted Christian fundamentalist beliefs, Gunderson became a self-appointed expert on the Satanic ritual abuse of children without ever conclusively proving its existence.

In 1988 - the same year as Core first went public with claims of ritual abuse and human sacrifice in Hull - Gunderson appeared as a guest on two episodes of the hugely-popular American daytime TV show Geraldo under the title: ‘Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground’.

Introduced as a “cult investigator”, Gunderson agreed with claims there were at least one million active Satanists operating in America. He also made his own bold allegation about the supposed existence of a mass burial ground for the victims of Satanic ritual murder in Washington state.

“They can’t possibly go out there and dig them all out because there are too many of them,” he said, suggesting any search to find actual evidence to support his wild claim was not really worth the bother.

Years later, the show’s host Geraldo Rivera, admitted being misled by some of the sensationalist claims made at the time.

A 2024 article on the show by US writer Marlena Williams places the Geraldo Satanist special at the centre of the era’s moral panic over child abuse.

Williams paints the picture of a perfect storm being whipped into a frenzy by the emerging 24-hour news cycle and the burgeoning movement of victim’s rights organisations often spearheaded by fundamentalist Christians alarmed at what they saw as an increasingly liberal society. Caught in the middle were concerned parents unsure who or what to believe.

“It didn’t matter that most acts of child abuse, including sexual abuse, are committed by relatives or friends, or that Satanism as an ideology has far less to do with violence and demonic worship than it does personal liberation and opposition to Christian doctrine, or that scant physical evidence was ever found to corroborate any of the Satanic panic’s most outlandish claims.

“Moral panics do not operate out of fact but out of ignorance and fear, mobilizing blatantly obvious fictions to keep the existing order safe.”

As for Gunderson, I found an article by American social activist Lucien Greaves particularly illuminating.

It’s worth pointing out Greaves is the founder of the Satanic Temple, which is officially classed as a church by the US Internal Revenue Service. Temple members say they don’t believe in Satan in a literal demonic sense but as a symbol of rebellion and opposition to authoritarianism and, in particular, the influence of extreme Christian nationalism in America.

Greaves’ piece was written well after Gunderson’s death in 2011 but he still doesn’t hold back, describing him as “a delirious source of unreliable information” and “a public paranoid for hire”.

“In theory, and at best (if one were to attempt to justify him), Gunderson practiced something of a criminological transcendental metaphysics, seeking the very source of crime itself in each individual crime he devoted his attention to, seeing them all tied to an all-pervasive network of evil.

“In practice, he was more of a ride-along observer to the shifting paranoid folklore panics of his times put forth by moral crusaders, modern witch-hunters, and outright con-men (and women) who benefited from attaching the prestige of a former G-man’s endorsement to whatever implausible conspiracy narrative they happened to be selling.

“Throughout the moral panic of the 1980s and the 1990s regarding Satanic cults thought to be subverting Christian-American lives, he would regularly appear on daytime talk shows warning of the insidious influence of Heavy Metal music and ubiquitous subliminal urgings being silently forced upon impressionable youthful minds.

“Ted Gunderson’s manufacturing of ‘evidence’ for claims of Satanic abuse have helped sustain an ongoing credulous conspiracist anti-Satanist panic.”

Core’s decision to invite Gunderson to join her investigation in a Hull council estate wasn’t a random accident. His visit was part of a wider influx of American Christian fundamentalists into the UK at the time, mostly involving well-funded lecture tours addressing sympathetic church groups, social workers and police officers with Satanic ritual child abuse as the main item on the agenda.

By then, Core and Childwatch had become nationally known thanks to their pursuit of Hull vicar Jan Knos, who died of a heart attack in prison while waiting to face trial on 28 charges of indecency against young children. I wrote about the case here last week.

After Knos’ death in late 1986 the group’s profile soared, helped in no small part by Core’s knack for generating publicity. There were more campaigns, more donations and even a charity single written and performed by pop singer Jim Diamond with former Police guitarist Andy Summers providing photographs from an accompanying video.

By the time the single was released in the summer of 1987, Core’s focus had shifted beyond child abuse in the UK to forging new links with emerging Christian fundamentalists beating the drum about devil-worshipping sexual predators in America.

In doing so, she was joined by ally and Childwatch trustee Geoffrey Dickens, the MP who had tried to name Jan Knos using the shield of parliamentary privilege before he had even been arrested and who campaigned to re-criminalise homosexuality.

Before long both Core and Dickens would help turn American Christian fundamentalist paranoia into Britain’s very own Satanic Panic.

Thanks to the pair’s Fleet Street contacts, events on a previously unremarkable council estate in Hull were soon making lurid headlines in the red-top national tabloid newspapers.

It all started with one family reaching out to Core over claims that their young son had been sexually abused by a man. Within a few months, Core believed at least 23 boys were part of a Satanic ritual abuse ring being run by a group of paedophiles.

She had spoken to all of the boys and told reporters she believed everything they said.

No-one seemed to raise a red flag over a group of suggestible children being interviewed at length by people apparently determined to find devil-worshippers in a remote corner of Hull.

Were young children being sexually abused by adults? Perhaps. Sadly, it happens and probably more often than most of us would like to think. Were they being forced to drink blood and take part in Satanic rituals? Yet again, actual evidence was thin on the ground.

The ring’s grim activities were said to have mainly taken place in a house and a garage on the estate. Core claimed some of the boys had also told her about being abused on trips to the coast.

Later, in her 1991 book Chasing Satan, Core goes into some detail describing how the garage was used as initiation venue where boys were sexually abused while lying inside a large pentagram drawn on cardboard laid on the floor.

From the garage they were allowed into the house where drugs were handed out like sweets.

The men, she said, would take photographs and films of the boys, making money by distributing them to a wider market of paedophiles. Some would make arrangements for boys to visit London or Europe where other members of the ring would be waiting for them. Today such activity would be classed as trafficking.

Core claimed this sinister ring had a name - Scorpio.

Despite having her faith in the police severely tested by their handling of the Knos case, she continued to pass on information gathered by Childwatch. However, the group’s investigation in Longhill would ultimately test that relationship to the limit.

After being alerted by Core, the police were obliged to investigate but found themselves having to conduct potentially sensitive enquires against a backdrop of hysterical tabloid coverage with both Core and Dickens making increasingly sensational allegations.

By now, Core was also collaborating with freelance national journalist Tim Tate who had previously investigated the murky world of child pornography and was now on the trail of devil-worshipping child abusers. Soon the pair would also be working with TV reporter Roger Cook on a two-episode special of his The Cook Report series on the supposed explosion of Satanic ritual abuse across the UK.

In her subsequent book, Core attempts to distance herself from the programme having originally worked as a consultant on it. She tells how she was forced out over a decision to invite American Satanist Michael Aquino to take part in the filming.

Aquino probably merits an entire Substack piece about him but, until then, here’s a thumbnail sketch up to and including his trip to the UK to play the part of Roger Cook’s pantomime villain.

A specialist in psychological warfare for the US military and an Army officer, he had served in Vietnam with the Green Berets and later worked as an intelligence officer. Alongside his job, he founded his own religious group known as the Temple Set in 1975, specialising in the occult and spiritual Satanism.

With Cook and Tate unable to find a British Satanist willing to take part in the programme, they turned to Aquino who had already appeared on a number of American TV talk shows, including the same Geraldo special with Ted Gunderson.

Accompanied by his wife, the couple appeared in The Cook Report wearing all black with Aquino sporting either a wig or a hairstyle identical to Bela Lugosi in his famous role as Dracula.

In the programme they appear wearing black cloaks performing a Satanic ordination ritual in the middle of a forest surrounded by swirling dry ice.

Viewers weren’t told the person supposedly being ordained was a leading member of the British branch of Aquino’s Temple of Set and already well-known to the couple. Equally, the extreme Christian fundamentalist backgrounds of several seemingly ordinary ‘witnesses’ said to be stalked by Satan and featured prominently in the programme weren’t mentioned either.

Watching it today, the only credible person involved appears to be Ozzy Osbourne who, in typical deadpan style, shrugs off claims that he’s in league with the Devil by insisting he’s just a simple rock star singing slightly daft songs.

Three years later, Core recalled in her book how the Aquinos’ presence triggered her sacking from the programme.

She said: “I introduced Tim Tate to victims and I did everything that I could to make sure the investigation was properly documented. We were dealing with serious stuff: children were being routinely tortured in the name of Satan and I wanted the public to realise that a thorough appraisal of society’s obligations to the innocent was a great matter of urgency.”

When Aquino was first approached to take part, Core thought it was because Tate and Cook wanted to quiz him on allegations made the year before that he had abused children at day care centre in San Francisco. Investigations by the police into the case were still ongoing.

However, when she discovered Aquino and his wife were being paid to visit the UK and appear in the programme by Central TV to perform a mock ritual ceremony, she hit the roof.

“What infuriated me with The Cook Report was the decision to pay the expenses for Aquino to visit Britain. Why did we need to import a leading Satanist? I strongly objected to the programme acting as host to a Satanist who was on the verge of being accused by his Army superiors of abusing a child. I publicly denounced the decision and I was, of course, promptly sacked as a consultant. My usefulness to the programme maker was now over anyway for the vital material was already in the can.”

As it turned out, the police investigation into Aquino closed because of a lack of evidence. It also turned out that a mother and daughter known to Core who also appeared in the programme were not quite who they seemed.

Both featured in another filmed ceremony, this time an exorcism performed on the girl and her younger brother by a friendly Satan-chasing Church of England vicar from Lancashire who was a leading figure in an extreme evangelical Christian group called the Reachout Trust. So extreme, in fact, that the same vicar had once campaigned to erect a large crucifix in Pendle Hill to counter its history as a hotbed of 17th century witchcraft.

In the scene, as the two children approach the altar, their mother tells viewers in a voice-over: “They’ve had ritualistic things done to them with snakes, crucifixes, they’ve been taught to pray to the Devil; they have in fact been brainwashed.

Their backstory wasn’t mentioned in detail except for the ‘fact’ that the girl (and her brother) were possessed by the Devil. At least, that was according to their mother.

Several years later, the girl - now in her 30s with a family of her own - put the record straight after contacting the not-for-profit Sub-Culture Alternatives Freedom Foundation (SAFF) after coming across a video on the group’s YouTube channel debunking all of the claims and most of the participants in the programme.

She confirmed the family had moved from London to Hull with Core’s help after initial allegations of Satanic ritual abuse involving the two children had surfaced while they were still living in the capital.

Speaking about her appearance on The Cook Report, she said: “As for the incident in the church, I was told by my mother that we were being ‘Christened’ to protect us from evil.

“The whole thing started when my father had been sent to prison for an assault on my mother while she was pregnant, I witnessed this, it’s one of my earliest memories. While he was in prison, my mother said I had to make allegations against my father and other people he knew. These ‘abuses’ were also said to involve my brother.

“At the time I was just turning four and my brother was two. I cannot remember this abuse. I remember missing my father terribly and only have good memories of my father from this time other than the assault on my mother. My father nor anyone else was ever charged with these allegations.

“We were then moved from south London to Hull aided by Dianne Core. I remember my mother had a lot to do with her and she became a key figure in our lives at the time.

“What you need to know was that my mother was mentally ill and I believe Dianne Core helped to feed my mother’s crazy ideas and enabled her.

“We were featured in at least two papers at the time and I remember being met by journalists. I know one was The Mirror, I think the other might have been The News of the World. We also featured in Tim Tate’s book.”

Tate had seen social services reports on the family while they still lived in London. In them, the girl’s two-year-old brother supposedly told how he had been anally abused with a crucifix. Tate included the story in his book.

The Mirror reporter was Fred Harrison, who penned a series of lurid exclusives on young children being allegedly abused by Satanic devil-worshippers. Harrison would later co-author Core’s book.

The woman told SAFF: “I grew up being told by my mother this (SRA abuse) had happened and obviously remember the questioning. I used to have nightmares frequently. My mother told me the things in my nightmares had happened to me but that she had made it so I couldn’t remember them.

“My mother went on to emotionally and physically abuse me throughout my whole childhood and would have frequent mental breakdowns. She was fixated on Satanic abuse and everyone was a suspect - my stepfather, Childwatch, my school.

“She even accused my friend’s family of abusing myself and my brother again in around 1994/5 and that we had witnessed a child being sacrificed. No matter how many times I told her this had not happened she would not accept it and would physically beat me by punching, kicking, biting and pulling me around by my hair.

“She carried this in for about two days until I ‘admitted’ it out of pure fear and wanting the abuse from her to stop. She made us give statements to the police about this but I was never questioned without her being present or watching via video so I was too frightened to tell them she had made it all up.

“My life from then on was horrific. I was mentally, emotionally and physically abused by my mother on an almost daily basis. She would also examine me on a daily basis for signs of sexual abuse. I was kept off school for long periods and alienated from everyone. We had no contact with family or friends and I felt totally helpless and hopeless.

“It was then that I started to wonder if the ‘abuse’ by my father really did happen or if it was a very vivid figment of my mother’s twisted imagination.

“I have documented proof that social services were constantly involved and recognised my mother’s bizarre and intimidating behaviour but did nothing to safeguard us. There are reports from neighbours of hearing my screams and cries and witnessing our pale and scruffy appearances. There’s even one report of Mum confessing to a friend that she heard voices telling her to drown us all yet we were left in her care.”

The manipulation of a vulnerable family’s appearance in front of an altar waiting for an exorcism to be carried out for the purposes of a TV show didn’t seem to bother Core who, along with Childwatch trustee MP Geoffrey Dickens, was now speculating up to 4,000 children a year were being killed by British Satanists.

Dickens aired his claims in the media and in Parliament. In an interview with She magazine which was immediately picked up by the national tabloids, he even claimed babies were being killed as offerings to the Devil. Conveniently, he explained evidence of this was hard to come by because “with witchcraft practices nothing is ever found.”

Core was also quoted in the story, repeating her claims that children were being abused while tied upside down on large crucifixes. She also stated children were more likely to be kidnapped by Satanists around the time of annual festivals such as the Autumn Equinox.

Around the same time Core also embarked on a lecture tour around Europe funded by American far-right political activist and arch-conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche who would soon be jailed for 15 years for fraud.

However, her involvement in allegations in Longhill was also becoming a major problem for the police and social services, not least because neither had found any evidence of Satanic ritual abuse.

Eventually, social services in Hull went to court to secure an injunction preventing her from contacting one of the boys because it was felt he was being harmed by her continued interference in his case.

The police’s frustrations with Core were eventually revealed in a report submitted to an inquiry into a separate multi-generational child abuse investigation in Nottinghamshire. As in Hull, initial allegations of Satanic abuse swirled around the case but, once again, no evidence was ever found. Ultimately, 11 members of an extended family were jailed for serious sexual assaults on 21 children.

Because of the similarities between the two cases, Humberside Police was invited to share its experience in Longhill as part of the inquiry and the resulting report, which was made public by the Hull Daily Mail in 1991, was damning.

Written by a senior detective, it said two ‘cast iron’ prosecution cases against two adults suspected of indecent assault in Hull had been effectively derailed by Core’s involvement with witnesses and a resulting contamination of evidence.

Core naturally disputed this in her subsequent book, pointing out that a third man had been convicted.

She also used the book to infer the unsolved 1984 murder of schoolboy Christopher Laverack was connected with her still-unproven belief of a Satanic child abuse ring operating in Longhill. She suggests only repeated warnings by her solicitor against naming names are the reason for her not doing so. However, she then makes several anonymised references to Christopher’s alleged killers using the plural tense. It seems a very deliberate move to imply that a group of people were responsible for the murder.

The claims prompted a senior detective in the Laverack case to emphatically deny any Satanic links to the murder.

Undeterred, Core and Dickens went on the offensive and demanded an independent inquiry into the police’s handling of the Longhill case and they succeeded. However, when the team from South Yorkshire Police delivered their findings a year later, they backed the Humberside investigation and dismissed Childwatch’s complaints.

Even then, the saga dragged on as the South Yorkshire report was duly referred to the Crown Prosecution Service. It took the CPS until 1997 to announce there would not be any charges against the Humberside officers involved in the Longhill case, although there was criticism that several officers had refused to cooperate with their South Yorkshire counterparts. The CPS also categorically stated there has been no evidence of Saranic ritual abuse. In total, the inquiry and the CPS review cost £4m

By then, the SRA bubble was bursting after so many allegations and so little evidence.

In 1998 I reported on a case which, in hindsight, was the final nail in the Satanic Panic coffin. It involved the Court of Appeal quashing the conviction of a Hull man for serious sex offences against a young boy.

The court heard how the man, who was educationally subnormal, had readily agreed to suggestions put to him by the police and had signed a confession written for him while in police custody without having a solicitor present.

He was convicted on the strength of his confession after charges against two co-accused with dropped because of the unreliability of witnesses. If this sounds familiar it’s because he was the only person convicted as a result of the Longhill investigation - Core’s third man.

The court was told vital documents were not disclosed to the defence at his trial, including a full record of his police interview and the fact that witnesses had withdrawn their allegations against him. The missing information only came to light during the follow-up inquiry by South Yorkshire Police.

After his successful appeal, Humberside Police declined to apologise. “The appeal process is finished and we now consider the matter closed,” said Assistant Chief Constable Gordon Clark. Five months earlier, Dianne Core wound up Childwatch and quietly retired from public life.

Despite this, her one remaining ‘live’ conspiracy theory - that Christopher Laverack had been murdered by a group of devil-worshipping Satanists - lingered on for another 14 years.

In 2012 it was finally extinguished when Humber Police identified Christopher’s uncle Melvyn Read, who had died four years earlier aged 65, as the probable killer.

Previously jailed for sex offences against four young boys, Read was still serving his seven-and-a-half year sentence when he died from cancer in Hull Prison. Alerted by his convictions to a possible link to Christopher’s murder, detectives were poised to arrest him on his release.

A review of the case after his death used new forensic techniques to match pollen and plant material found on Christopher’s clothing with a water feature in Read’s garden. An ornamental brick believed to have been used to inflict serious head injuries found on the boy was also forensically linked to the same water feature.

The new evidence was set alongside already known facts about Read gathered in the aftermath of the murder. He lived close to the home of Christopher’s elder sister where the abduction had taken place. His van had been seen parked nearby on the same evening. He had been unable to give a satisfactory account of his whereabouts that night and was also familiar with Beverley Beck where the boy’s dumped body was found having once worked nearby. However, he had no record of sexual offending at the time.

Until his 2002 arrest for the offences he was eventually jailed for, police had been unable to find enough evidence to charge Read with the murder. Now, armed with his recent offending record and new forensic evidence, the material was tested by an independent QC who found the evidence against the dead man was “conclusive”.

Christopher’s remaining family accepted the conclusion. Detective Superintendent Ray Higgins, who had taken on responsibility for the long-running investigation, said: “Read was an evil man and a man wholly without remorse. I am satisfied that Christopher's family can have some sense of closure and understanding of what happened. The few officers still working on this case, between their other duties, have been determined to do all possible to solve the case and have simply refused to give up."

There was no mystery gang of Satanic killers involved. Christopher had been abused and murdered by his own uncle.

Today I see many elements of the Satanic Panic being repeated with the grooming gangs issue here and the Epstein case in America. Now that we are blessed with Internet, conspiracy theories are rife just about every topic you can imagine.

Could it all happen again? Sadly, I’m almost certain it will.