The Satanic Panic is back. Utah already investigated it.

Four separate investigations across thirty-five years — the FBI, a $250,000 state task force, a two-year police inquiry, and the courts — went looking for an organized satanic ritual-abuse ring. This is the complete record of what they found, and why the claims keep resurfacing anyway.

By Todd Noall · Executive Director · Updated July 31, 2026 · 28 min read

The Facts at a Glance

$250,000 appropriated by Utah's Legislature to investigate
30 months of state criminal investigation
4 independent investigations, 1992–2025
ZERO corroborated ritual-abuse rings

Sources: Utah Attorney General ritual-abuse investigation and 1995 report · FBI Behavioral Science Unit (Lanning, 1992) · Provo Police Department summary and Utah AG declination letter, per court filings · 4th District Court, March 2025

In June 2026, a Utah podcast published a two-hour episode of satanic-ritual-abuse claims reaching, by implication, the senior leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its audience encountered the material as breaking revelation — hidden evil, finally exposed, suppressed by people with everything to lose. Almost none of them knew that the State of Utah had already spent a quarter of a million dollars and thirty months answering exactly this question, that the FBI had run the same check nationally, that Provo police had spent two years on the modern version of it, or that a Utah court had dismissed the one prosecution built on these claims with prejudice. This article is the record they were never shown. It runs from a 1980 memoir through a 1990 memo written inside the Church, through the state task force that grew out of it, through the collapse of the national panic, into the 459 pages that revived it, and forward to the podcast episodes now generating a defamation suit. Everything here is sourced.

And a single sentence summarizes it: every time someone with subpoena power has looked, the answer has been the same.

Section One — The First Panic, 1980–1995

It started with a book

The modern satanic ritual abuse phenomenon has a documented origin point: a 1980 memoir written by a Canadian psychiatrist and his patient, describing memories of abuse by a satanic cult that the patient had allegedly recovered during hypnosis. The book became a bestseller and, more consequentially, a template. Journalists who later checked its central claims — against birth records, church records, and the accounts of family members — could not corroborate them.

What followed through the 1980s was not a series of discoveries but a series of investigations. Day-care prosecutions built on suggestive interviews with very young children spread across North America. The longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history to that point — the McMartin Preschool case — ended without a single conviction. A generation of therapists, some trained in techniques since abandoned by their own professional bodies, produced accounts of ritual networks operating undetected in ordinary communities.

By the end of the decade the claims had reached Utah, and in 1990 they reached the desk of a Church officer.

The Pace memo — read it again

On July 19, 1990, Bishop Glenn L. Pace — a member of the Presiding Bishopric of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — wrote an internal memorandum to the Church's Strengthening Church Members Committee. In it he documented having spoken with roughly 60 members who described ritual abuse, and urged that the matter be taken seriously.

That memo is authentic. It leaked, and it has circulated online for three decades as the single most-cited piece of evidence that the Church knew about satanic ritual abuse and covered it up. It is worth stating the critics' case at its strongest: a senior Church officer wrote down that dozens of members were describing ritual abuse, the document was internal, and the Church did not publish it.

Now read what the document actually does. A local Church leader gathered accounts, wrote them down, escalated them to a standing committee, and argued that they warranted attention. That is the profile of a cover-up only if you assume the conclusion. It is a considerably better description of the opposite: an institution's officer routing allegations upward. And what happened next is the part almost never mentioned alongside the memo.

The memo is real. What it documents is a Church officer escalating claims for investigation — and within roughly a year, the State of Utah was investigating them.

Pace Memorandum, July 19, 1990

Utah took it seriously — and spent $250,000

Utah's response was not a press release or an internal review. The Legislature appropriated funds and the Attorney General's office built an investigative task force with subpoena power, which spent roughly thirty months running ritual-abuse allegations to ground across the state.

$250,000

Appropriated by the Utah Legislature · 30-month criminal investigation by the Attorney General's office, 1992–1995

This matters more than any rhetorical point either side can make. If an organized ritual-abuse ring were operating in Utah — particularly one implicating prominent people, as the claims held — the state task force is precisely the instrument built to find it. Investigators with compulsory process, a multi-year mandate, and a public appropriation are not a body you can wave away as incurious.

1995: what a quarter of a million dollars found

The investigation's public report, issued in 1995, substantiated no organized ritual-abuse ring — not in the state, and not within the Church. Investigators had pursued the allegations and could not corroborate the existence of the networks described.

One of the report's co-authors, veteran investigator Mike King, later addressed the specific claim that senior Church leaders were involved in ritual abuse. His assessment of that allegation: "absurd."

Check No. 1 · Utah Attorney General, 1992–1995

Question put to the investigation

Organized ritual-abuse ring corroborated?30 months · subpoena power · $250,000 appropriation

Finding

Never verified

Question put to the investigation

Claims implicating senior Church leadersAssessment of report co-author Mike King

Finding

"Absurd"

The FBI ran the same check nationally

Utah was not working in isolation, and its conclusion was not idiosyncratic. In 1992, FBI Special Agent Kenneth Lanning — the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit specialist on child sexual victimization, and a man who had spent his career taking child abuse extremely seriously — published an analysis of ritual-abuse allegations investigated nationwide.

Lanning's finding was that after years of investigation, there was no corroborated evidence of organized satanic ritual-abuse rings committing the crimes alleged. His argument turned on physical evidence: the claims routinely described homicide on a significant scale, and homicide leaves traces — bodies, missing-persons cases, forensic records. Investigators found none of it.

Lanning was careful about something our own reporting is careful about too. Concluding that an organized satanic network could not be corroborated is not the same as concluding that no one was ever abused. Children are abused, at scale, in ways that are documented and prosecutable. His point — and ours — is that the specific claim of a coordinated ritual network is the one that has never survived contact with an investigation.

Check No. 2 · FBI Behavioral Science Unit, 1992

Question put to the investigation

Organized satanic ritual-abuse rings corroborated nationally?Years of case review across U.S. jurisdictions

Finding

Never verified

Question put to the investigation

Physical evidence of alleged ritual homicideBodies · missing-persons cases · forensic records

Finding

None found

Why the first panic ended

The 1980s panic did not end because anyone declared it over. It ended the way unsupported claims usually end: prosecutions collapsed, convictions were overturned, and the scientific basis for the central mechanism gave way.

That mechanism was recovered memory — the premise that traumatic experiences can be wholly repressed for decades and later retrieved intact through hypnosis, guided imagery, or suggestive therapy. Memory research through the 1990s established that human memory is reconstructive rather than archival, and that suggestive techniques can generate detailed, sincerely-held, and entirely false recollections. Professional bodies issued guidance warning clinicians against precisely the practices that had produced the ritual-abuse accounts.

This is the single most important thing to understand about what returned to Utah twenty years later. The claims did not come back with new evidence. They came back with the same mechanism.

Section Two — Why It Can't Be Disproven

A claim built with nothing to check

Ordinary criminal allegations are falsifiable. There is a body or there isn't. A bank account moved or it didn't. A phone pinged a tower or it didn't. Investigation resolves them in one direction or the other, which is why most allegations eventually stop being contested.

The organized-ritual-abuse claim is constructed differently, and the construction is the story.

The structure of an unfalsifiable claim

The claim

A ring operating across generations, protected by people in power

What evidence would look like

Bodies. Records. Photographs. Financial trails. Defectors.

What investigators found

None of it — four separate times

How the claim absorbs that

The absence becomes the proof: it shows how deep the cover-up goes

A claim that treats every negative finding as confirmation cannot be resolved by investigation — not because investigators are compromised, but because nothing was ever specified that could fail.

That is not a conspiracy that evaded four independent investigations. That is a claim built with nothing to check. And it explains the otherwise puzzling pattern: the more thoroughly the claims are examined, the more evidence of suppression their proponents perceive.

What this article is not doing

Nothing here is a judgment about any individual's sincerity or their experience of harm. People describing recovered memories of ritual abuse are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, describing something they genuinely believe. Our subject is a structural claim — the existence of an organized ritual-abuse ring — and the institutions that have investigated it. That claim, not any person's account, is what has failed to survive scrutiny.

Section Three — The Resurfacing, 2012–2026

459 pages

In 2012, three adult daughters of a Provo psychologist produced written witness statements — ultimately 459 pages — describing what they said had happened to them as children. The accounts had emerged through recovered-memory processes. They named, by various counts, between 140 and 160 people as participants in an alleged ritual-abuse ring. The daughters delivered the statements to Provo police.

2012

The 459 pages are produced and delivered to Provo police, naming 140+ people in an alleged ritual-abuse ring.

2012–2014

Provo police investigate for roughly two years. Their summary finding: "no corroborating evidence aside from witness statements — no photos, video, DNA." The claims describe killings; investigators identified none of the physical record a homicide leaves behind.

2014

The Utah Attorney General's office declines to prosecute — the findings do not meet the "reasonable-likelihood-of-conviction" standard. No one named in the statements is charged on their basis.

May 2022

After a separate, unrelated accuser comes forward against the psychologist, the Utah County Sheriff announces an investigation into "ritualistic child sexual abuse." Reporters file records requests; the county releases the 459 pages.

Dec 2022

A Substack launches from Fountain, Florida, republishing the statements' claims as established fact — naming living people and publishing home addresses.

Two things about that sequence deserve emphasis. First, the 2012–14 investigation is check number three — the same claims, a new generation, the same result.

Second, the 2022 records release is the hinge. Documents that police and prosecutors had examined and set aside became raw material for anyone who wanted to republish them without the findings attached.

The Florida file

The Substack — "Investigations into Ritual Abuse," operated by Jamin Darcy, writing as "Goel," Hebrew for avenger — built a national subscriber base on Utah accusations, from 2,000 miles away. Its objective was not implied; Darcy published it. On December 19, 2022, he wrote that his goal was to see named people imprisoned and to "financially cripple this group and any related group that enabled them, up to and including the [LDS] church."

What followed, per the Sanpete Messenger's reporting and Utah court records, escalated from publishing into conduct that two courts have now addressed: a Spring City couple's home address and the addresses of their three daughters posted publicly; suggestions that followers surveil the properties around family birthdays; AI-generated deepfake videos of an accused man appearing to confess to killing "innocents" for Satan, distributed across five platforms; and, when a follower warned him he might be in danger, the reply "I'm armed to the teeth and willing to kill and die for this."

In October 2024, Utah's 6th District Court issued a civil stalking injunction against a local associate who, per court documents, had channeled $20,000 to the operation; that injunction is under challenge and remains pending. On January 30, 2025, Judge Randall Skanchy issued a twelve-page ruling granting a civil stalking injunction against Darcy himself, holding that the First Amendment does not protect communication meeting the definition of stalking under Utah's statute.

From Substack to studio: the podcast and its guests

Between January and July 2024, the Utah podcast We Are The People Radio aired three programs built on interviews with Darcy. The bridge from a Florida newsletter to a Utah broadcast audience was complete. And the guest roster that followed reveals how the supply chain actually works — three distinct lanes, one format.

The supply chain · per the show's own episode descriptions

Lane

Lane 1

Who appears

The Internet Researcher

What they bring

The Florida Substack operator, presented on air as an investigator. Three episodes, 2024 — the episodes now at the center of a defamation suit against the show.

Lane

Lane 2

Who appears

The National Circuit

What they bring

Touring claimants from the conspiracy-media ecosystem, most prominently a self-described survivor of the CIA's "MKUltra Project Monarch" program — claims that have circulated without corroboration since the 1990s and are not specific to Utah or to the Church.

Lane

Lane 3

Who appears

Recovered Memories

What they bring

Local guests describing "suppressed memories" and "flashbacks" surfacing decades later — the identical mechanism behind the 2012 statements, and behind the 1980s panic before that. This lane produced the June 2026 episode whose accusations reach an Apostle of the Church.

Three lanes converge on one studio and one format: a trigger warning, a multi-hour runtime, a sponsor block, a petition link. The guests change. The structure doesn't.

We examine that structure — and what the audience data reveals about why it exists — in our companion investigation, "How a Utah political podcast turned satanic-abuse accusations into money, power and influence."

Check number four: the courts

On January 3, 2025, the Spring City couple named in those episodes filed a defamation suit in Utah's 4th District Court against We Are the People LLC, Jason Preston, and Alexia Preston, citing fifteen statements alleged to be false and seeking damages, punitive damages, and an injunction. That suit is pending.

Then, in March 2025, the one modern criminal prosecution arising from this ecosystem — brought against the psychologist by a separate accuser, not on the basis of the witness statements — was dismissed with prejudice on evidentiary grounds. Dismissal with prejudice is terminal: the charges cannot be refiled. The judge urged careful scrutiny of allegations of this kind.

Thirty-five years after the Pace memo, the ledger reads as follows.

Four independent checks · 1992–2025

Year

1992

Investigation

FBI Behavioral Science UnitNationwide review of ritual-abuse allegations

Outcome

No rings corroborated

Year

1995

Investigation

Utah Attorney General — $250K, 30 monthsState task force with subpoena power

Outcome

Zero rings substantiated

Year

2014

Investigation

Provo Police + Utah Attorney GeneralTwo-year investigation of the 459 pages

Outcome

No evidence · declined

Year

2025

Investigation

Utah courtsThe one modern prosecution built on these claims

Outcome

Dismissed with prejudice

ZERO

Corroborated ritual-abuse rings · in thirty-five years

And the only case still standing anywhere in this ecosystem is the defamation suit — against the platform that published the accusations.

Section Four — What This Costs

What real abuse cases actually look like

The contrast is the clearest argument in this entire file, because it is not rhetorical — it is documentary.

Documented abuse cases

Court record

Charging documents, filed publicly
Named defendants with docket numbers
Physical or forensic evidence
Guilty pleas and convictions
Sentencing records
Prosecuted in state courts and federal ones — including, when warranted, people connected to prominent Church families

Organized ritual-abuse claims

Never verified

No charging documents in 35 years
No docket numbers
No photographs, video, or DNA
No bodies, missing-persons cases, or death records
No convictions
Four investigations. Zero corroborated rings.

Documented accountability is how victims actually get justice. The satanic-ring claims have produced, in thirty-five years, none of it. We maintain a running record of documented abuse cases and institutional accountability in our abuse case tracker and our investigation into abuse in the Church, because the difference between a claim with a docket number and a claim without one is the entire difference between accountability and noise.

Who pays for the panic

The panic does not threaten the powerful. It costs two groups of people, and neither one is the platform publishing it.

The first group is real victims of real abuse. Attention is finite, and documented cases — the kind with charging documents, the kind that can actually end in accountability — now compete against content engineered to be unfalsifiable, and lose. When a story with court records draws a fraction of the audience of a story with none, the incentive that produces is unmistakable, and it does not run toward the truth.

The second group is the falsely accused, who become victims of a different kind. In Spring City, a pottery shop that had stayed unlocked for forty-five years installed electric locks and cameras. Family members' addresses circulated online with surveillance suggestions attached. People who were never charged with anything by anyone found themselves in court — as plaintiffs, trying to establish in a civil proceeding what four criminal investigations had already declined to find.

The record isn't hidden

Nobody ignored these claims. The FBI investigated them and could not corroborate a ring. Utah appropriated $250,000 and investigated for thirty months and could not substantiate one. Provo police investigated for two years and found no corroborating evidence. The Attorney General declined to prosecute. A court dismissed the one case that reached it, with prejudice.

Discredited. Discredited again. Discredited again. Discredited again.

The "deep state" and "Church cover-up" framing is a compelling story. It is also a story that four independent institutions have now tested against evidence and been unable to confirm. The record of that testing is public, sourced, and has been sitting in plain view for three decades.

It isn't hidden. It's just fewer views and less money than the accusation.

Our own standard, applied to us

Every finding above is attributed to a specific investigating body and a specific document. Where we characterize the Pace memo, we state the critics' strongest reading first. Where we describe the mechanism of unfalsifiable claims, we address the claim structure, never any individual's sincerity or experience. We name no accuser and no accused Church leader. The physical-evidence line is our observation drawn from the investigators' findings and requires a pin cite before publication. The defamation suit's status must be confirmed on the docket before this page goes live, and we have invited the platform to respond.

FAQ

Did Utah investigate satanic ritual abuse claims?

Yes. Utah's Legislature appropriated $250,000 and the Attorney General's office ran a roughly 30-month criminal investigation with subpoena power. The 1995 report substantiated no organized ritual-abuse ring in the state or in the Church.

What is the Glenn Pace memo?

An authentic internal memorandum written July 19, 1990 by Bishop Glenn L. Pace, documenting accounts from roughly 60 members who described ritual abuse and urging the matter be taken seriously. It records a Church officer escalating allegations for investigation; a state investigation followed within roughly a year.

What did the FBI conclude about satanic ritual abuse?

In 1992, FBI Behavioral Science Unit specialist Kenneth Lanning published an analysis finding no corroborated evidence of organized satanic ritual-abuse rings committing the crimes alleged, noting that the claimed homicides would have left physical evidence that investigators did not find.

Have these claims ever been substantiated?

No. Four independent checks — the FBI in 1992, Utah's Attorney General in 1995, Provo police and the Utah AG in 2012-2014, and Utah courts in 2025 — produced zero corroborated ritual-abuse rings across thirty-five years.

If you or someone you know needs support

Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline — 1-800-422-4453 (call or text), childhelphotline.org

RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline — 1-800-656-4673, rainn.org

To report actual abuse to federal law enforcement: tips.fbi.gov

Mormonism Explained

Trademark notice: Mormonism Explained operates under a trademark license from Intellectual Reserve, Inc. It is an independent publisher and is not owned or operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.