Utah Satanic Ritual Abuse: Satanists at Large

Bishop Pace

A Governor's Task Force on Ritual Abuse was created in March 1990 out of concerns raised by the Governors Commission on Women and Family and the state Task Force on Child Abuse. The task force concluded that ritual abuse was occurring in Utah as a significant problem and recommended that the legislature appropriate $250,000 to the Attorney General's office to hire four investigators for a year. Some funds were appropriated, and two investigators were hired.

In late February 1995, the Utah Attorney General's office closed a two-and-a-half-year investigation with two investigators of "over 125 cases of alleged ritual crime. In some cases, these investigations involved hundreds of hours of investigation and evaluation. In addition, the Unit investigators have met with hundreds of citizens who claim to be victims of satanic, religious, physical or sexually motivated ritual crimes.None of the allegations have resulted in prosecutions, except for the case of the Zion Society in Ogden." The investigators used a broad definition of ritual ("any customarily repeated act or series of acts"), differentiated between ritualism and occultism, and described eleven different types of occult groups.'

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