Mendocino County Today: Monday, Oct 26, 2015

• Branscomb Tragedy
• LakeCo's Summer
• Mental Health Concerns
• Boonville Services
• Development Costs
• Group Hysteria
• Yesterday's Catch
• NAMI Meeting
• Random Chron
• Day Tripping
• Autumn
• The Raven
• Inspirational Kicker
• Opposing DG
• Killing Ourselves
• Swoonatra Phenomenon
• Rotten Apple
• AV Pigs
• Along Comes Mary
• FB Witchhunt

A LAYTONVILLE AREA YOUTH DIED early Sunday morning and several others may have been injured when an early morning crash ended tragically.

Tim Henry, the principal of Laytonville High School, confirmed around 5am this morning, one of his students was in a school van which crashed on Branscomb Road.

A reader who described the incident as joyriding tells us that there were multiple boys involved in the incident though Henry would not confirm this.

Henry says the community will be dealing with a lot of pain. “It’s going to be hard for the students… and teachers and the families. A lot of people are affected by this. We’ve got to grieve.”

A request to the CHP for more information had not yet been returned as of Sunday evening.

(Courtesy, KymKemp.com)

LAKE COUNTY'S SUMMER OF PAIN

by Phillip Murphy

There has never been a summer of wildfires like the one residents of Lake County endured in 2015, both in number and in size. It began with the July 29th Rocky fire, which burned 69,438 acres and destroyed 43 homes. It was followed by the August 9th Jerusalem fire, which burned 25,118 acres, and the September 2nd Elk fire, which consumed another 673 acres. There was also a smaller fire in August that threatened the town of Lucerne, which was probably saved solely by the timely and precise attacks by CalFire's giant DC-10 fire bomber.

Big aircraft also made the difference in the Elk fire, which was hammered into submission mainly by an intense attack by helicopters and fixed wing air tankers, and an ancient four engined C-54 saved the day during the 215 acre August 22nd Peterson fire. But on the hot, windy afternoon of September 12th, the CalFire aerial armada was over a hundred miles away working on the Butte fire, which eventually burned 70,868 acres and 475 homes. When fire broke out in a ditch running through the yard of a home on High Valley Road the county already had plenty of warning of what to expect-except this time there would be only a minimal air attack available in the first few critical hours.

The Valley fire was almost instantly noticed by the neighbors across the street from the point of origin, who immediately called Calfire and began to do whatever was possible to contain the flames. The fire skirted around the home and began to burn a nearby woodshed, which the two men managed to save after removing several gas cans that can be seen in the many media photos of the site. No one was home where the fire started, but there were at least two things in the ditch that could have possibly sparked the blaze. The first was the wiring and water lines that ran from the home's well to the vegetable garden that was reached by a small wooden bridge spanning the ditch. The lines appeared to be in very close proximity to one another as they crossed the ditch, and a water leak may have caused an electrical short which in turn could have ignited the nearby weeds. The wiring itself appeared to not be entirely intact or complete, though it was not clear when viewed at a distance if this was due to work done on it before or after the fire.

Another other possibility is that the broken piece of the bottom of a clear glass jar that was found in the ditch could have ignited nearby weeds or pine needles, as the time the fire began coincided with the time of day that direct sunlight could hit the glass, instead of being shaded by the tall trees that surrounded it. Whatever the source, the fire quickly spread into the weeds and underbrush behind the home and headed up the hillside to the south, with the direction switching to the east as the fire met with the powerful afternoon winds streaming over the ridge. CalFire received their first call at 1:22 pm, and by 1:51 pm requested help from the Lake County Sheriff's Office to help with evacuations.

This is where the incident began to take a tragic turn, and when hours of panic, confusion and terror for thousands of local residents began. The method used to alert Lake County residents to emergencies is a reverse 911 phone system, but after a small number of people received an automated advisory evacuation call it began to fail as the few land lines serving the area burned. Scores of frightened fire area residents were making calls to 911 dispatch, and more calls came in from concerned friends and relatives wanting the sheriff to evacuate loved ones, which further confused the situation and taxed dispatchers. With no functioning alert system the handful of deputies on duty were forced to spend their time going door-to-door to order evacuations, and the it-looked-good-on-paper formal evacuation plan was forgotten. In spite of the local fire departments having a list of people unable to self-evacuate, this information was never requested by the sheriff and was not forwarded to him by any fire chiefs.

The reason given by sheriff Brian Martin was that there was no time to help those who couldn't evacuate themselves-the fire was moving so fast the five deputies he had on duty could only go house-to-house and try to get as many people out as possible. There was also no time for updating any of the county's public information sources like the OES website and Facebook page or Twitter account, so the limited amount of news people could access was frequently either outdated or in conflict with what CalFire was saying, particularly in the case of evacuations and road closures. The local emergency broadcast system consisting of four commercial radio stations was also not utilized, apparently also due to the lack of time and staff.

For decades the county had relied on a warning system consisting of sirens located at every fire station like those used to warn of tsunamis or tornadoes, and it's 2009 Community Wildfire Prevention Plan called specifically for the sirens in the communities of Cobb and Loch Lomond to be upgraded, as well as for new ones to be installed at Lake Pillsbury within five years. But the sirens remained quiet throughout the disaster, and are never even mentioned in the county's 2013 Natural Hazards Mitigation Plan. At some point the decision was made to stop using the sirens, but there is no public record that shows when this happened and why. Sirens would have freed-up deputies to evacuate the elderly and disabled, and undoubtedly would have saved lives, though a month after the fire began they are still either sitting behind fire stations or otherwise disabled.

As the afternoon progressed the fire was now displaying the same frightening characteristics of the Rocky fire, burning rapidly in three different directions at once and creating it's own weather system. The bright summer day had turned dark, as an enormous plume of smoke covered the sky from one side of the Clear Lake basin to the other. Pages of books and newspapers were falling from the sky over ten miles from the fire and ash was drifting down like snowflakes, coating everything with a grey sludge. The fire was now growing at a rate of several thousand of acres an hour and was clearly completely out of control, yet no mandatory evacuations were ordered for many communities that were directly in harm's way. Finally a nixle alert was issued at 6:31 pm, for the few that had signed-up for them and still had cell phone service it may have helped, yet it only advised evacuations-they were not mandatory.

By 7:30 the fire had reached Anderson Springs and likely claimed it's first victim, 72 year old Barbara McWilliams. McWilliams caregiver had informed the Sheriff's office and CalFire about the disabled woman being unable to evacuate herself, but by the time deputies made it near her home it was engulfed in flames. Another Anderson Springs resident was 69 year old Leonard Neft, who was one of the few that had received an evacuation advisory robo call, but by the time he had made the decision to leave it was too late. 66 year old Robert Fletcher of Cobb also was unable to escape the flames, and so was 65 year old Hidden Valley resident Bruce Burns. 61 year old Middletown resident Robert Litchman remains missing and is presumed dead; most if not all Middletown residents received no alert of any kind and either saw the smoke or were warned by neighbors to leave.

By the time the fire was contained it had scorched 76,067 acres, burned 1,280 homes and 26 apartments to the ground, along with many historic buildings like the Hobergs resort. Small communities like Cobb and Whispering Pines had a rustic charm that will be hard to replace when the rebuilding begins, as architecturally they were a visual trip back to the 1940's. Already a slew of building restrictions have been lifted in the fire areas, with the emphasis on getting buildings replaced ASAP with not much thought given to any major planning changes that could be incorporated. Residents are questioning the removal of so many trees around PG&E power lines, as some see the cutting as excessive and accuse the utility of using the fire as an excuse to do cutting that would never have been allowed before on private property.

There were other problems as well, as when the fire reached Middletown the municipal water system failed as the power lines burned, meaning there was no water to fight fires, yet the county courthouse has two enormous back-up generators that have not been used since they were bought before the Y2K scare. An additional irony is that the south county has what is considered to be a model fire prevention program, and the area was considered better prepared than most of the county to deal with a major fire.

Perhaps the only good decision made that day was to evacuate the Clear Lake Riviera and surrounding communities, which could have been an even far worse disaster if they had begun to burn. One thing that became obvious in the course of the incident was that the ongoing problems with the Lake County Office Of Emergency Services had not been corrected, as several days into the disaster OES director Marrisa Chilafoe quit for unknown reasons. Chilafoe was an odd choice for the position, as her background was more along the lines of maritime fires and spills, rather than protecting small rural communities from natural disasters. Chilafoe's tenure in the position was brief, about twice that of her predecessor, whose time at the helm was measured in months after a DUI arrest seems to have ended it. Now Social Services director Carol Huchinson is unofficially running the show at the OES, the fourth person to have the job in the last two and a half years.

The county Human Resources department is still not even posting a job listing, so it can be assumed that the OES will continue to be a haphazardly managed afterthought for the time being, something to generate enough paperwork to make FEMA and the state happy and not much more. In spite of the plethora of obvious failures on the part of many involved at the management level of Lake County first responders, so far nothing has publicly changed policy or procedure-wise since the incident began, and there has not even been a public discussion of what worked and what didn't undertaken by county government. In fact, the only thing that has changed since the fire began was that as the forest was still burning the Board of Supervisors voted themselves and top management hefty 10% raises, even for the ones who bungled their jobs so badly that it cost people their lives.

Even more amazing is that Rob Brown, the supervisor whose district suffered the most damage, is now planning to run for a fifth term in 2016. Brown's hand-picked successor's Beau Moore's home burned to the ground in the fire, causing him to drop out of the race in order to focus on rebuilding. Brown was also the chairman of the committee that crafted the 2013 Natural Hazards Mitigation Plan, which only mentioned the evacuations and the alert system briefly, and placed all faith in the phone system that failed so badly. Brown was on familiar ground on the committee, as his ranch has been the epicenter for a myriad of disasters — everything from escaped buffalo colliding with cars to a "controlled" burn getting loose and burning down the neighbor's barn, or his son's car taking out a nearby utility pole that shut off power to nearly all of Kelseyville for several hours. Brown is also on the county "Disaster Council," another paper entity that seems to have little to show for its efforts, with little transparency and zero public awareness.

There are a slew of changes that need to be made to correct the problems: sirens need to be reactivated and tested, the county needs a better way to get time-critical data out to the public than Facebook and Twitter, and the reverse 911 system needs to be a back-up plan and not the primary alert system. The OES has to be staffed by someone competent, and that means offering competitive pay for once. The fire chiefs need to step-up and earn their large paychecks, as unlike the sheriff their focus is public safety and they should have foreseen some of the problems with the evacuation. No one had to die in the Valley fire, as there were several hours to alert people that were squandered when the sheriff's decision to order mandatory evacuations was delayed in spite of the obvious need; combined with the lack of a reliable alert system the two elements became a fatal mix.

Today the wind is warm and dry, and the county waits and watches the sky for the first trace of smoke, knowing that we are no better prepared than the day the Valley fire began.

OR LACK THEREOF…

Letter to the Editor

Re; Mental Health In The Coastal Community

Carmel Angelo, CEO of the Mental Health system states "There has been an interest and obvious concern regarding our ongoing mental health services." it should read "lack of mental health services" Of course there is concern. The families who strive to help their loved one through the political maze and convoluted bureaucratic meetings should be concerned. What has been accomplished so far? Is there housing, and crisis care as well as counselors and psychiatric care here on the coast? Is there a system in place to help the mentally ill stay compliant with their medications? It seems the money goes for administration, not to those who need the help.

Is it lawful for Ms. Angelo to appoint Stacey Cryer as the new "interim" mental health director? It appears to me Ms. Cryer is too busy to do the position justice. What qualifies her and can she do an adequate job?

The proposed "Ad Hoc" Committee will consist of more talking, more meetings and what will the financial burden be? While I am seeking answers as a member of the community, where does our county stand on "Laura's Law?

Respectfully Yours,

Joan Hansen

Fort Bragg

WATER & SEWER FOR BOONVILLE? Take 2

by Mark Scaramella

Mendocino County's Chief Planner Andy Gustavson opened last Thursday night's meeting. It was the second called to discuss a possible water and sewer system for downtown Boonville and some of the surrounding area. Gustavson came armed with parcel maps prepared by the Planning Department.

According to current R-1 zoning (residential, one unit) there are 152 residential lots in the area which form what Mr. Gustavson called the "existing baseline." If things stay the way they are, there is a short term potential for up to 174 dwelling units (via second homes or trailers) on those 152 parcels, which run from about the Highway 253 intersection, north up Highway 128 then west to include Airport Estates. In addition, there are 58 commercially-zoned parcels in that corridor, many of them built out.

WIthout a municipal water and/or sewer system these parcels could theoretically expand over time to approximately 199 parcels with up to 391 dwelling units.

But If either water or sewer service was developed for downtown Boonville for these parcels, the development potential increases to 413 residential parcels and up to 813 dwelling units. Also, commercial development potential increases to 75 parcels.

If both water and sewer service was provided, the residential development potential increases further to 733 lots with up to 1441 dwelling units.

In theory. Mr. Gustavson emphasized that these were simply development potentials under various zoning scenarios, not likely, practical options. Many other (mostly market) factors would affect the actual development in downtown Boonville.

However, if water or sewer service is provided, obviously, more residences could be added to existing lots, including in places where there are now septic systems and leachfields. Also, the minimum lot size for a given residence goes down to 6,000 square feet if municipal water and sewer service is provided.

Of course, any increase in residences translates to more people, more homes, more services, more commercial activity. "But I would not hazard a guess about how much increase would actually occur," Gustavson added. He also declined to speculate about the increase in property values or tax assessments that would accompany such development.

Mr. Gustavson also noted that the Anderson Valley section of the County's General Plan says that the County encourages water and wastewater system development for Anderson Valley.

He also said that some small lots, particularly in the Haehl Street area and along Highway 128 and in Airport Estates are already so small that they probably could not be further subdivided, and would pose significant limitations to private septic system upgrades without a municipal system.

Community Services District Board Chair Valerie Hanelt who, with fellow board member Kathleen McKenna, is the guiding the potential development of water and sewage disposal, pointed out that the primary goal would be to alleviate the housing shortage and to improve the public health of the Boonville area while at the same time maintaining the rural character of the town. (Anarchic as it is, there have never been negative health consequences from living in downtown Boonville.)

Ms. Hanelt is setting up an advisory committee of local residents to continue to pursue discussion of basic infrastructure, identify service area options, and pursue possible state and federal grants and loans. Initial grant paperwork is in, but no commitments have been made. If things work out — perhaps a long shot at this point — a planning grant could be awarded which would fund a consultant to explore options, cost them out, and prepare to put the idea to a vote of the property owners in the service area. This process is viewed as three or four years out.

To volunteer for Ms. Hanelt's advisory committee email the Community Services District manager Joy Andrews (districtmgr.avcsd@gmail.com) or call 895-2075.

THINK IT THROUGH

Dear Directors of the Community Services District,

I am writing in regard to the proposal for a potential water and sewer system in Boonville. As a resident who will be affected by this plan I attended the meeting held at the Mendocino County fairgrounds on 10/22/15. I missed the first meeting in May and therefore wasn’t aware of the scope of this proposal. Previously I thought the main concern of the board was to deal with the inadequate water and sewer situation on Haehl St. which does need addressing. I’d heard some talk of perhaps putting in an adequate water tank for the residents in need etc. But Thursday night I came away with new information and a huge concern over this much larger plan.

The handouts included notes from the meeting of May 20, four maps including the existing area designated for the plan, one of development potential without services, another for development with sewer OR water services and the last with potential with both sewer AND water. And there was a handout from Mendocino County Dept. of Planning and Building, entitled “Boonville Water/Sewer System Build-out Analysis Rationale and Assumptions.” This document gives several scenarios ending with a table which shows that in the designated area on the maps there are 152 residential potential lots with a potential of 174 dwelling units and 58 commercial development potential lots. It then shows the build out with water OR sewer and the potential with BOTH water and sewer. The last figures with both sewer and water show the development potential of 733 lots with 174 - 1441 potential dwelling units and 75 commercial lots.

The meeting proceeded with information on how this new system of water and sewer would function to bring a large amount of development to Boonville. The cost of feasibility is large but not as huge as the actual implementation of installing such a system. At this point there are no designated areas to put in wells and a waste treatment system. And the final cost would be borne by the owners of the designated properties. At least I learned that they had the final vote on whether or not this would be implemented.

Upon returning home I did a quick search for such systems in California and found an August 1, 2014 article in the Hi-Desert Star regarding a wastewater collection and treatment system in Yucca Valley.

http://www.hidesertstar.com/news/article_ad6f7f34-19f3-11e4-a670-0019bb2963f4.html

New cost estimates for Yucca Valley sewer project released

Part of the article includes this information: “The costs are $96 million for the collection system, $30 million for the treatment plant and $19 million for construction management, design engineering and other expenses. The engineers now estimate the construction costs to property owners in phase one of the rollout will be:

$18,280 for a single-family home;

$13,915 for a multi-family residence;

$10,495 for a mobile home park unit;

$14,255 for undeveloped land.

$8,775 for deferred properties, whose connection will be put off until development warrants it.”

These costs are for waste only and don’t include a new water system, which is being proposed in Boonville. And I’m aware that the costs here would not be the same, but it does give something to work with.

If one drives through the area designated on the map most of the lots are small and along the highway. There is no room for potential development. The potential development is on the outskirts of the main town. The people who live along the highway would have to pay a sizable amount of money for the new services, even if they are prorated over a long period of time. In addition they would be paying a monthly charge for the water and sewer service as though they lived in a city.

I live on the outskirts of the area on almost two acres. I have absolutely no desire to buy water each month from some system that holds and distributes water. I also learned that the new infrastructure would come to the edge of the parcel and the owners would bear the cost of bringing the utilities to the required places on their property, which could cost a great deal. The current septic tank would need to be removed (mine is only 15 years old) and hookup to the new pipes installed for that and for the water. In addition to the cost, the excavation and installation of all the pipes needed would create a nightmare of digging and delays in the valley. I don’t think the majority of property owners in the designated map outline can afford such systems. If just the water is done first and septic later the digging and turmoil would happen again.

I moved here just over 40 years ago. I came to live in a beautiful and peaceful valley in the country. The potential build-out of this plan would create a town where there is more noise, more traffic, more businesses, more need for services (probably stop lights) and would change the character of Boonville forever.

The owners on Haehl Street who need a new system could not afford this new plan as proposed. Although I am definitely in support of creating safe water and sewer for the small area in town that needs it, I am adamantly opposed to this larger plan. I do hope that you will reach out to the property owners in the area you propose to install this system and see if there is any agreement for it. There is so much waste in government spending and I don’t think any funds should be allocated unless there is enthusiastic agreement by the majority land owners who will be affected.

Best Regards,

Xenia King

Boonville

EXCELLENT COLUMN as always by Tommy Wayne Kramer in Sunday's Ukiah Daily Journal, a look back at one of the most shameful interludes in Mendocino County's often shameful history. TWK writes:

“Scholars intrigued or fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials should turn their attention to the Satanic Abuse storm that accused many, destroyed some, and accomplished nothing except to leave the lingering stench of tyranny oozing from the politically correct. You can still savor the aroma and with it a firm resolve among American males to avoid future contact or involvement with children. Be alone with a kid? Forget it. Be a schoolteacher in a class of 30 students? Don’t even ask.

In Mendocino County the epicenter was in Fort Bragg at a childcare facility called Jubilation Day Care. As the fabricated shock waves detailing utterly depraved news about Satanic rituals perpetrated upon pre-school children began rolling across the country it was inevitable they reached Mendocino County. Our therapists were waiting, rubbing their soft, moist hands together.

The stories were as bizarre as they were horrifying: Children were being raped and tortured at Jubilation Day Care. The staff, wearing clown masks and forcing kids (in the beginning, as foreplay) to eat peanut butter they were told was human feces, were transported to distant horror chambers. Matters devolved from there.

A Mendocino County Deputy DA provided me (I was working at the now defunct Mendocino Grapevine at the time) details about the allegations. Children at Jubilation Day Care were routinely boarded onto helicopters and flown to remote locations where they were defiled, tortured and raped. They were ordered to say nothing to adults or worse things would happen to them and their families.

And who were these monsters aboard these helicopters transporting pre-schoolers to hellish horror chambers? Why, timber company executives, that’s who.

It was the perfect scenario for the angry, hate-filled therapy women: Wealthy white men running big corporations doing filthy things to children. It was terrible. It was horrifying. It was wonderful!

Fuses were lit, and Jubilation Day Care exploded, imploded, closed and awaited the lawsuits and the criminal indictments. Therapy sessions for children boomed as never before or since, as professional children advocacy groups gladly took up the cause. The Orr sisters, who ran Jubilation Day Care, were chased out of town.

Staffers in the Mendocino County Victim Witness program wore buttons reading “I Believe the Children” in the courthouse. Local therapists counseled kids in hopes of eliciting information they’d been molested, or at least traumatized. A favorite technique was to convince children that they had “repressed memories” and that proof of someone having been abused was to have no memory of it.

The reigning wisdom: If you don’t remember it, it must be true. This has even less validity than trials for “witches” involving river dunkings, or deciding guilt based on blisters appearing on the palm of a suspect’s burned hand.

Shuffled into this dishonest nonsense was Past Lives Regression and Channeling, which provided therapeutic guidelines for events from a hundred or a thousand years ago. Trouble was, it was all untrue. None of it happened. The hot air balloon emptied.

This was Mendocino County therapy at its peak. Despite their shabby, dishonest and immoral practices, I have not heard in the 30 years since of a single one of these therapists admitting to a mistake or apologizing either to the children or to those accused. How many lives were ruined by these state licensed MFCC crazies?…”

* * *

THE MIGHTY AVA, cough-cough, was on the case from its sordid beginnings in Fort Bragg when it all kicked off with a big push from a social worker named Pam Hudson. The Orr Sisters were not defended by Coast Lib because, you see, they were the wrong kind of women — working class Catholics who opposed abortion who couldn't possibly be admitted to the sisterhood without a complete revamp of their belief systems.

TO ME, author of a very long piece on the Orrs, which we've re-posted at the end of today's collection of bleats and blips, it wasn't only the failure of Coast Lib to speak out about a latter day witch hunt in their community, it was the total abdication by the Superior Court of this County. Come on — one of the Orr sisters lost her daughter to CPS to keep the child from Beelzebub's always scheming clutches. What judge could possibly sign off on something like this?

A MENDOCINO COUNTY JUDGE with his finger to the political winds, that's who, just as a Mendocino County judge's signature was on the adoption papers of about 50 black children from the Bay Area given over to a megalomaniacal speed freak called Pastor Jim Jones, all of them murdered at Jonestown. These lethal sign-offs were orchestrated by Tim Stoen of the People's Temple, who then functioned at Mendocino County Counsel and now serves as the reinvented prosecutor for the Mendocino County District Attorney's Office. Ah, Mendocino County, where history starts all over again every day and you are whatever you say are.

THE MENDOCINO COUNTY Sheriff's Department even sent an officer — then-sergeant Gary Hudson — to Devil Worship classes so local law enforcement could keep up with the purely imaginary (by evil-minded people) mass assault on Mendocino County's pre-schoolers.

ANYWAY, interested persons are invited to read the entire depressing saga re-posted below. If you operate under the delusion that Mendocino County is a progressive, enlightened jurisdiction… Well, it isn't.

CATCH OF THE DAY, October 25, 2015

CRYSTAL CHARLES, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

IVORY GEORGE, Ukiah. DUI, possession of honey oil.

JESSE HARDIN, Cloverdale/Ukiah. Carelessly starting a fire.

SCOTT HEIDINGER, Ukiah. Drunk in public.

ALEXANDRIA KOHLER, Dunlap/Ukiah. Arson of structure or forestland.

GERARDO MAGDALENO, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

KEVIN MULLINS, Ukiah. Possession of more than an ounce of pot.

ENRIQUE NUNEZ-DAVILA, Covelo. Pot possession for sale.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ-MEZA, Ukiah. Criminal threats.

RICARDO ROJAS, Willits. Drunk in public.

EDWARD WARREN, Ukiah. Drunk in public.

THE FUTURE OF MENTAL HEALTH IN MENDOCINO COUNTY — A COMMUNITY MEETING

On Wednesday, October 28, 2015, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) in Mendocino will host a public meeting addressing mental health challenges. The guest speaker will be Sheriff Tom Allman. The program will be held at the Ukiah Valley Medical Center Glenn Miller conference room, 275 Hospital Drive, Ukiah from 6:30 to 8pm.

The challenges of mental health are complex. A mental health challenge can be a disease or condition affecting the brain that influences the way a person thinks, feels, behaves and/or relates to others and to his or her surroundings. Although the exact cause of most conditions is not known it is becoming clear through research that many of these conditions are caused by a combination of genetic, biological, psychological and environmental factors. One thing is for sure — they are not the result of personal weakness, a character defect or poor upbringing, and recovery from a mental challenge is not simply a matter of will and self-discipline. However, providing mental health services to those in need can also be a challenge.

Too often prejudice and stigma hamper the development of mental health policies and these are reflected in a lack of respect for the human rights of mentally ill people, the low status of the services provided and a lack of support given to work for mental health. Yet one in four individuals will be affected by mental health issues in their lifetime. People are constantly exposed to harmful stress that leads to an increase in anxiety and depression, alcohol and other substance abuse disorders, violent and suicidal behavior. These social causes of mental health problems are manifold and can be induced or reinforced in many different settings. Marginalized and vulnerable groups — such as victimized populations, the unemployed, those with disabilities or who are already experiencing mental health problems — can be at particular risk.

Unfortunately there are very few resources to address these issues and too many times our jails inadvertently become the default mental institutions in our communities.

Many residents of Mendocino County can attest to the tragedy of this lack of services.

Sheriff Tom Allman has had personal as well as professional experience with the challenges of mental health issues. He can speak well to the hope of advancing our county out of the darkness of limited services to the light of a caring, supportive community.

All people interested in the future of mental health services in Mendocino County are invited to attend. For more information call Jan McGourty at 468-8632 or Donna Moschetti at 391-6867.

THE CHRON presented an interesting collection of random crazy stuff in Sunday's edition reflective of our zany times. In a column called "Connectivity, Balancing the Masculine/Feminine," I learned that I was toxic. I think. The prose got a little confusing. "Toxic masculinity. The harmful social construct that describes the masculine gender role as violent, territorial and emotionally removed while also rejecting perceived 'feminine' attributes."

There are people who actually puzzle over the question?

READING RIGHT ALONG I came to a story called, "Is pot for sick pets a blissful high, or just bad medicine?" The author should have asked a dog, but I'll betcha there are plenty of two-footed stoners out there force-feeding their animals the miracle drug.

THERE WAS A LONG review of a book called Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent, "a longtime writing professor at Stanford University." Despite this ID I read on for something having to do with Mendocino County, but what the reviewer described was the usual academic creative lit about nothing of interest to this reader and nothing, apparently, having to do with Mendocino County.

SATURDAY morning I joined a long-line of day-trippers at Larkspur Landing for the ferry ride across the bay to the Ferry Building, seating myself outside so I could wave to the boys in the crowded exercise yard at San Quentin.

THERE'S always a good slug of Mendo boys at Quentin being processed for placement at the state's ever larger prison system, and there's always at least one guy waving wistfully at the passing ferry. Mendo boys are also assigned to Quentin for parole violations. I wondered if the Laytonville killer, Talen Barton, was at Q yet, and I wondered how Q will assess and assign him. Given his age and lack of criminal sophistication, Barton will probably be placed in protective custody somewhere, and we should all wonder why Public Defender Linda Thompson, the old dump truck herself, didn't plead the boy out as insane. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't, but he set a new record for being processed Mendo's criminal justice system. Took only about three months to get him put away for 72 years.

AT THE FRISCO end of the voyage I caught the 1 California for Van Ness where I then footed to the tiniest theater in The City to watch a documentary film on the Black Panthers. I recognized a number of the non-famous people in the film, even know a few of them from my youth spent as an enemy of the state. I thought the movie was a fair and honest look back at the Panthers that didn't romanticize the movement in the least, a movement which I think, on balance, was a good thing and a necessary thing, but as someone in the film says if you keep talking up violence, as Eldridge Cleaver did constantly, people are sure to get killed.

THERE HASN'T BEEN a more tumultuous time in America's tumultuous history. Everywhere one looked, there was something unprecedented going on in American society — the hippies, the Vietnam War and the mass protests it inspired, free range psychos like the Zodiac killer, J. Edgar Cross Dresser, America's lead cop and almost as crazy as Nixon, the pill popping president who finally nutted up completely and had to resign. The Panthers were just one more headline in a daily deluge of startling events.

FOOTING IT SOUTH on VanNess, The City's civic collapse is more and more evident. There are terminally screwed up people everywhere, and the streets stink and are trash-strewn. One would think that with $167 million being spent on the homeless annually, the mayor, a jolly incompetent named Ed Lee, could at least fund sufficient Port-A-Potties and public showers for the small army of Thanatoids roaming The City.

ON THE OTHER HAND, given the magnitude of the homeless problem, the ultimate solution, if there is to be one, resides with the national government. Wandering Thanatoids* are everywhere in the land, but there are a lot more of them in sunny California because you are unlikely to freeze to death out here, although a large number of chronic drunks are carried off every year during the cold months in San Francisco and the East Bay. But we're unlikely to hear anything about national homeless strategies from any of the national candidates because it will cost millions to house and help all of them and they don't have much in the way of advocates who don't make handsome livings off them.

* * *

* “Weed Atman was one of many Thanatoids — people who are victims of karmic imbalance and inhabitants of a strange state of being like death, only different.” —Thomas Pynchon, “Vineland”

FALL INTO BOTANICAL GARDENS

Photo by Susie de Castro

THE RAVEN by Edgar Allen Poe read by Vincent Price

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zuGZ_wp_i9w

FORT BRAGG FOOTBALL PLAYER OVERCOMES STRANGE ILLNESS

A most unusual thing happens after Fort Bragg Timberwolves kickoffs: The kicker immediately peels off the field and sprints to his sideline. The reason why is a testament to the dedication of Cadu Whitlock, his teammates and coaches.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/sports/4655876-181/fort-bragg-kicker-is-bouncing

OPEN LETTER TO MENDOCINO COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

Subject: Support of Appeal to Deny Permit for Dollar General (DG) Store in Redwood Valley

I am a resident of Redwood Valley, and our home is about a half mile from the proposed site of a proposed Dollar General store. I join the Appellants in my strong opposition to this store, and share with hundreds of other Redwood Valley residents a sense of violation of our rights as taxpayers and longtime residents of Mendocino County.

We arrive at the current situation due to poor decision-making that encompasses public officials, current and past; predatory corporate practices; and lack of attention to the details of the planning process on the part of local residents. We as residents and/or voters tend to believe that our best interests are well entrusted to the hands of the officials we elect and the appointed officials whose salaries we pay. In Redwood Valley, we’ve had a rude awakening. We learned that County officials have granted a permit “by right” to corporations from Tennessee and Texas to construct a Dollar General occupancy that is opposed by most people who live and pay taxes here in Mendocino County. First, we believe that those officials are wrong. Second, these lessons will not be forgotten any time soon. The group “Rural Mendo” has formed, and we will continue working on the local planning process to prevent future fiascos of this nature. We all have much better things to do with our time than to fight off a corporate junk store, but here we are and it must be addressed.

Why County Counsel and Planning Department Staff are Wrong

Lawyers for Dollar General (DG) and their real estate front, Cross Development, spend a lot of words dismissing the Appellants’ claims because the permit decision was “ministerial.” (Their word barrages are part of the public record.) The Planning Department staff and County Counsel echo those claims because it might not be prudent to admit that the County’s so-called EIR for the 2009 General Plan is laughably vague. While it is always difficult to prove a negative (i.e., the inadequacy of the EIR relative to Redwood Valley and other rural areas of Mendocino County), the Appellants’ lawyer, Brian Momsen, succinctly shows how little is actually contained in the General Plan or EIR pertaining to Redwood Valley. The provisions of CEQA clearly are not addressed, and that means that the CEQA is not met relative to a DG in Redwood Valley.

For example: The proposed DG site sits atop a slope about 100 yards from a tributary of the Russian River. DG’s lawyers claim their facility will trap all storm water on site. Seriously? We know it hasn’t rained much lately, but it will storm again. How big are those sumps going to be? DG’s lawyers claim, disingenuously (I won’t say they’re lying), that water usage at the property will be less than in a neighboring residence, as it will involve only 2 restrooms. Of course, those restrooms will be useable by as many employees, delivery personnel, transients, and other members of the public who troop in and out daily; water will also be needed for the landscaping and to wash down whatever it is DG needs to wash. Presumably, a septic system will also be in place, again just yards from the Russian River. The County issued a well permit without so much as a nod to the severe water crisis currently visiting Redwood Valley; or to the thousands of other residents, farm operations, and businesses with prior water claims. CEQA at the very least requires assessment of impacts to water supplies, and NPDES (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) to storm water runoff. The EIR fails to address any water issues whatsoever. Arguing that the permit is “ministerial” begs the question of the EIR’S inadequacy relative to the CEQA requirements. The Appellant’s argument is supported by the strong opposition of the public on numerous grounds, ranging from the health impacts of increased diesel emissions to roadway degradation to emergency response times from the neighboring fire station. Others who are making comments against the DG address a plethora of reasons why further CEQA evaluation is necessary. Common sense argues for a bona fide assessment under CEQA. Let us hope that the next argument on this subject will not have to be in a court of law. Perhaps an upcoming change in County Counsel personnel will open the possibility of re-assessing recent legal review on this subject.

As to whether the General Plan nod to “Smart Growth” is met, clearly DG fails the test. This DG would procure an off-sale beer and wine license just a stone’s throw from three others at the very same corner. Smart Growth America defines principles related to economic sustainability, protection of air, water, natural habitat, and reuse of existing buildings. Smart Growth supports medium-wage rather than low-wage jobs, protection of drinking water, improved health, and increased property values. Locating a Dollar General in Redwood Valley advances NONE of these principles, as the predatory business model and corporate record of the DG Corporation fully demonstrate. Local goods and services are sold by our local businesses; inferior and even hazardous foreign goods, junk food, low worker staffing/pay/benefits, and cheap alcohol are specialties of the DG model.

The Lessons of the DG Process

My husband and I are refugees from the endless suburb-scapes of Southern California and the Central Valley. Through the 50’s, 60’s and beyond, we watched the disappearance of rolling hills, ocean views, and orange groves. Now, those places are paved, green belted, blighted. You’ve been there, where you pass one city limit after another and they’re all the same. My brother lives in Ft. Bragg and he told me, oh, that could never happen HERE, but the County of Mendocino and the City of Ukiah have made some planning decisions that will forever change the nature of this beautiful county.

Dollar General Corporation is an $18.5 billion enterprise that models itself as a mini-Wal-Mart, with all the predatory business practices that entails. At the Planning Commission meeting where the permit for the store was appealed (and denied), I was amazed to hear the lawyers and planners say that the Dollar General had received a “permit by right.” The lot in question was zoned as a C-2 in the 2009 General Plan. In other words, the Mendocino County planning process seems to allow the Dollar General corporation from Tennessee and its developers from Texas to dump a 9100 sq. ft. building on us, with all its lights, traffic, noise, pollution, and cheap liquor. A “permit by right” means that we who live in Mendocino County, who are invested here, pay taxes here, and care about this place, have no say about what happens in any C-2 zone. We, the people, get no say about the environmental impacts of this store, impacts to the sheep and goat farm next door. Issues like water scarcity, late hours, garish lights, interference with emergency response from the fire station on the corner, and economic blight are not considered. Over 1700 people signed a petition against this business, demonstrating how strongly we locals feel about the incompatibility of the Dollar General with our community. Such a situation is precisely the type envisioned by the CEQA, and which CEQA intends to address.

The Mendocino County General Plan references “Smart Growth”, but taken altogether, this Dollar General in this place is a real case of DUMB GROWTH. Poor staff work and lack of public oversight of the 2009 General Plan process has left the door wide open to our County’s rural areas. According to current policy, virtually ANY C-2 General Commercial occupancy can open in ANY C-2 zone in Mendocino County. The first local residents may learn about this “back door” planning process—or shall we call it a lack of planning process—is when the ground gets broken, because this process is not public. Absent the appeal process, the entire DG fiasco has taken place behind closed doors.

The current Board of Supervisors has taken a bold and necessary step to correct past wrongs by placing a moratorium on “formula stores” for the near future. However, that action offers no relief for Redwood Valley residents so vociferously opposed to the DG. Only this Board of Supervisor’s actions can help. I ask this Board to re-assess the failures of the 2009 General Plan and address the CEQA as required by law and applied to Redwood Valley. Otherwise, the County must be prepared to face court challenges, with all the attendant costs. Again, the County doesn’t have time or money for this, but when weighed against the consequences, we residents will continue to fight for our rights.

In controversies such as this one, we hear lots of noise about property rights, free enterprise, and capitalism; how any limits to growth and industry are against the American way. Hogwash. In the very preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the founders state their intent to “promote the general welfare.” General welfare. Scary concept? Sounds like “Socialism”? More hogwash. We as Americans know that public policy is negotiated, and that consideration of the community at large is essential to civic well-being. That is why we of Redwood Valley and rural Mendocino feel such outrage at DG’s seeming ability to bulldoze over our rights, needs, and concerns. This Board must not cave to DG’s arrogant position. Should this Board act in favor of the Appellants, I suggest that the Dollar General advocates will think carefully about filing suit against Mendocino County, since they may have hopes of opening a DG in a more appropriate place in the county. I would not be opposed to such a store, perhaps in a location not under the current moratorium, though I would not shop there. It is not all growth I oppose, but DUMB growth.

For the future, the “Rural Mendo” group is growing, organizing, and formulating a mission statement. We are forming Municipal Advisory Committees and will take an active role in amending the County’s General Plan and Zoning Code in favor of a more balanced, intelligent, and progressive approach to growth. We will support this Board and County staff to achieve a more modern way of improving Mendocino County, and are committed to this process for the long haul.

In sum, this Board has ample legal justification for denying the Dollar General permit in Redwood Valley. Such action is the right thing to do to promote the general welfare of Mendocino County. I, and the other residents of “Rural Mendo,” urge you to do the right thing.

Respectfully,

Christine Boyd

Redwood Valley

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Back in the day, if you killed a kid, you either turned yourself in or you would be killed. Even though gangsters were criminals, they had a code. If you wanted to kill somebody, you’d wait till he was alone and walk up and shoot him. Today, squeeze the trigger of these automatic weapons and you’ve got all this collateral damage. It’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry, all you other people who got shot. It’s just your bad luck you happened to be standing next to the guy I wanted to get.” They don’t care if 50 people gotta get shot to get the one. They’re all right with that. These guys have nothing to live for, so their street cred is how many bodies they got. You change families, lives, for generations. And over some dumb shit. Given the movie’s theme, what’s your take on recent incidents of unarmed black men being killed by police and the movements that have sprung from that? I’ve never tried to present myself as a motherfucking spokesperson for 45 million black folks. This is my opinion: We as a people can’t talk only about Black Lives Matter, I Can’t Breathe, Don’t Shoot, and then not talk about this self-inflicted genocide we’re doing to ourselves. For me, it goes hand in hand. Only by talking about both and addressing both can we bring change. Cops ain’t just killing us. We’re killing ourselves, too. (Spike Lee talks about his new movie, Chi-Raq)

THE “SWOONATRA” PHENOMENON reached its apex in the fall of 1944. When Sinatra performed at the Paramount Theater in New York that October, the throng of frenzied teenage girls—the so-called bobbysoxers—made mayhem in the streets. After a Sinatra performance—and Sinatra gave nine of them a day, starting at 8 in the morning—the girls refused to vacate their seats. Sometimes as few as 250 left theaters crowded with more than a dozen times that number. Police had to be called in. In what came to be known as the Columbus Day Riot, the bobbysoxers set in motion the pattern of behavior that marked the arrivals of Elvis Presley in 1956 and the Beatles eight years later. Having practiced their fainting techniques in advance, girls shrieked and swooned in bliss when the skinny vocalist bent a note in his patented way.

When Sinatra met Humphrey Bogart, the star of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon said that he’d heard Sinatra knew how to make women faint. “Make me faint,” Bogart said. Sinatra’s faint-inducing ability was also on the agenda when he met Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Fainting, which once was so prevalent, has become a lost art among the ladies,” the president told Sinatra in the White House on September 28. “I’m glad you have revived it.” Then the commander in chief asked Sinatra how he did it. “I wish to hell I knew,” Sinatra said.

— David Lehman

ROTTEN AT THE CORE

by Eric Alterman

…To focus on Steve Jobs's personality is to obscure a far more important point about the global force he helped to unleash.

Apple may be the most successful corporation of all time. It recently reported a quarterly profit of $18 billion, the largest in history. Its record for technological innovation is unchallenged. It is the most admired brand in the world, according to the 2015 Interbrand Best Global Brands report. And its recent market-capital valuation at $765 billion (before dropping a bit) is the highest ever for any US company...

But two other factors have contributed mightily to Apple’s success: the unconscionable exploitation of the people who manufacture its products, and the company’s refusal to contribute even a fraction of its fair share in taxes...

In December 2014, the BBC documentary series Panorama secretly filmed inside a number of Chinese facilities where employees of Pegatron and Foxconn were assembling the newest iPhones. As the documentary noted: “The team found Apple’s promises to protect workers were routinely broken. It found standards on workers’ hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile workers were being breached.”

…The corporation could easily demand structural changes in the way its supply chains are constructed and workers are treated. But it can get away with only pretending to do so because the vast majority of its customers—to say nothing of its fanboy media following—care only about the coolness of its latest gadgets, and not a whit about the exploitation and misery experienced by the people who actually make them.

Similarly, Apple is just as good at avoiding taxes as it is at making iPhones. In 2013, a Democratic Senate staff investigation found that by creating mail-slot entities all over the world and attributing its profits to them, Apple has managed to pay just 2 percent in taxes on $74 billion of income overseas. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, 18 of America’s largest corporations, led by Apple, deployed these tactics to avoid paying $92 billion in US taxes last year.

And if that isn’t bad enough, Apple — which has $181.1 billion socked away in offshore accounts — is among the group of multinationals lobbying Congress to grant them a second repatriation tax holiday so they can bring an estimated $1.7 trillion home at the significantly reduced rate of 6.5 percent. The last tax holiday, passed in 2004, led to a cut of more than 20,000 US jobs and lowered R&D spending—directly contrary to the arguments made on its behalf, the Senate report found.

If only someone would make a movie about that.

(Courtesy, The Nation Magazine)

"ALONG COMES MARY"

Every time I think that I'm the only one who's lonely


Someone calls on me


And every now and then I spend my time in rhyme and verse


And curse those faults in me

And then along comes Mary


And does she want to give me kicks, and be my steady chick


And give me my pick of memories?

Or maybe rather gather tales of all the fails and tribulations


No one ever sees

When we met I was sure out to lunch


Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks


Whose sickness is the games they play


And when the masquerade is played and neighbor folks make jokes


As who is most to blame today

And then along comes Mary


And does she want to set them free, and let them see reality


From where she got her name?

And will they struggle much when told that such a tender touch as hers


Will make them not the same?

When we met I was sure out to lunch


Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

And when the morning of the warning's passed, the gassed


And flaccid kids are flung across the stars


The psychodramas and the traumas gone


The songs are left unsung and hung upon the scars

And then along comes Mary


And does she want to see the stains, the dead remains of all the pains


She left the night before?

Or will their waking eyes reflect the lies, and make them


Realize their urgent cry for sight no more?

When we met I was sure out to lunch

Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch.

— Tandyn Almer

The Association:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdSkl9_E0kc

The Guess Who:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dqHalNJDjc

THE GREAT FORT BRAGG WITCH HUNT

by Bruce Anderson

(Ed Note: This thing is 9,000 words long, and probably suitable reading only for insomniacs.)

* * *

Isn’t it just like Lucifer to plunk his evil self down in a pretty little Mendocino County mill town of forested hillsides, ocean bluffs, and rivers running to the sea?

Life was good in Fort Bragg, population 7,000 when Beezlebub set up shop out on Airport Road. It was 1983. The town's largest employer, Georgia-Pacific, was running its big mill round the clock, the employable were employed, the salmon fleet down in Noyo Harbor was prospering, the high school football team was winning. If people were lying awake at night worrying about what Satan was up to they kept it to themselves.

Twenty years later, and many miles away, a woman falsely accused of being Satan’s handmaiden does not have fond memories of Fort Bragg, but she can’t forget the town, and someone in Fort Bragg can't forget her.

"The phone will ring late at night," Barbara Orr begins, "and a voice will say something like, 'We know where you are, and we'll always know where you are.' There are people in Fort Bragg who are still after me. They're still after my sister, too. And even Kelly, my sister's daughter, who was only a little kid when all this started, they're still after her, too."

The 'theys' were never after Pam Hudson. She grew up in a comfortable Sacramento home, graduating from high school in the same class as the famous American writer, Joan Didion, whom Hudson would later describe to acquaintances as "a snob." As a better-than-average student whose parents could afford the expensive tuition, Pam Hudson went off to Mills College For Women in Oakland. From Mills, she went on to Columbia University where she obtained a master's degree in social work. Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, the liberal Democrat was employed as a mental health counselor and case-worker in social service bureaucracies.

In Fort Bragg, where she’d relocated in the early 1970s, the twice married but now single Ms. Hudson found a job with the Mendocino County Department of Mental Health. Her specialty was disturbed children. In her free time, Hudson co-founded the Gloriana Opera Company in whose first Gilbert & Sullivan production she played one of the three little maids.

"She was an attractive woman who always managed to look twenty years younger than her real age," a Fort Bragg woman remembers. "She could play the sweet innocent well into her fifties," the acquaintance continues. "I believe she had been married at least twice, and I know she had many gentlemen friends. Pam was a cultivated person. I know she had season tickets to the San Francisco Opera for many years. She also won some bit parts in 'Murder She Wrote' episodes filmed in Mendocino. She liked drama, and I don't mean that as a criticism of her; it was just part of her personality."

Early in 1983, Barbara and Sharon Orr, neither of them much past 30, opened a daycare center on Airport Road in Fort Bragg. Barbara Orr invested her life savings in the purchase of the property. The sisters were not college graduates, and they were not "cultivated" in the sense of expensive women's colleges and opera tickets. Barbara had earned an AA degree in early childhood education by going to college part-time. The Orr Sisters, daughters of the working class, were formidably large women who'd always supported themselves.

The Orr Sisters, and Barbara Orr’s little girl, Kelly, had arrived on the Mendocino Coast about the same time as Pam Hudson. They’d come to Fort Bragg from Forestville in West Sonoma County where Barbara had owned and operated a popular and well-respected daycare center. Before Forestville, the sisters had lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, having headed west from their childhood home in Illinois.

"California was the place where everything exciting seemed to be happening," Barbara says, echoing a sentiment felt by tens of thousands of young people in the late 1960s. "It wasn't Illinois, in other words. I landed in Oakland in 1971 and every year afterwards I moved a little farther north. I moved to Sonoma County, then to Fort Bragg in 1981. I bought the place on Airport Road and opened a day care home. I also opened a cafe downtown because I like to cook. Some people who'd worked for me in my day care business in Sonoma County moved to Fort Bragg with us. I called the day care ‘Jubilation Day Care’ and the cafe the ‘Jubilation Cafe.’"

Barbara Orr was the mother of a little girl named Kelly. Kelly's father had abandoned Barbara when he learned she was pregnant. Kelly was 7 years old when her aunt and her mother moved to Fort Bragg.

In 1983, the stylish, sophisticated Pam Hudson, and the less stylish Orr sisters still hadn't met, but in Fort Bragg, like many other areas of the country, rural and urban, a kind of low-intensity hysteria had begun to build fueled by rumors that Satan had kicked off a renewed national offensive, that communities of devil worshippers were thriving everywhere in unsuspecting America. Not only had The Horned One made a big comeback through rock and roll, pornography, drugs, and devil-inspired hedonism of all kinds, he'd taken control of day care centers where his followers regularly debauched toddlers as part of their services. Children, some of them infants, were being consumed in Satanist rituals! And now Lucifer had set up shop in Fort Bragg out on Airport Road at a place called Jubilation Day Care.

One wouldn't expect a graduate of Mills College or a District Attorney, or any other college-trained professional, to believe that children could be molested, even

murdered, in complicated rituals on the premises of day care centers during business hours, but Fort Bragg was home to one Mills College graduate who not only believed it, she became minor league famous for combating it. And district attorneys around the country, including the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, had already managed to parlay the testimony of pre-schoolers into major felony prosecutions of day care proprietors and workers.

"In Fort Bragg, everyone seemed to believe that something very weird was going on out at Jubilation," is how one long-time Coast resident explained the gossip that seemed to preoccupy the town in 1983. "The rumors got so bad I knew people who were talking about killing the Orrs."

(Orr Sisters Figure)

32800 Airport Road property had been purchased by Barbara Orr in 1981. Satan's  alleged Mendocino County headquarters consisted of several ramshackle buildings arrayed over three acres within sight and sound of the Pacific. The main house is only a few feet from the busy road running along side the three acres. A barn sits a few feet from the main house. Several small outbuildings rounded out the devil's workshop. The property is unfenced and all its structures are clearly visible from nearby, heavily traveled Airport Road. It is a highly unlikely venue for infanticide. The ever-enterprising Orrs, with lots of help from members of their Caspar church, fixed the place up to meet licensing standards.

"Gary Linden and a bunch of people from church remodeled everything," Barbara Orr remembers. "My clientele," Barbara says with a sigh at the recollection, "consisted of a lot of cocaine addicts, heavy drug users and alcoholics. Legally, Jubilation Day Care was just in my name because I met all the requirements for a state license. One thing they tried to pull on me later was that I wasn't there 80% of the time as the law requires of the licensed person. But because I was open 24 hours a day, I did the mornings and I did the nights; I was there 80% of the time. And I had some good employees. I had really good employees. Most of them had been with me before in Forestville. And they all lived with me in Fort Bragg at some time or other."

The enterprising Orrs also opened up a cafe in downtown Fort Bragg.

"The restaurant was just another passion of mine,” Barbara says. “I saw that the women around me needed employment. They could work at the restaurant, get paid a small wage and they got tips. They could also work in the daycare center in exchange for childcare. We did a lot of bartering. So that's why I did it all, out of necessity for those around me, my community. I was paying people six

bucks an hour to work. I thought it all worked until this stuff started circulating."

“This stuff” were the rumors that the Orr Sisters and little Kelly Orr were witches, witches and Satanist-inspired child molesters, maybe even baby killers.

Backed by the conservative congregation of the Orr Sisters' Caspar church pastored by Art Jones, Barbara Orr had also started a crisis pregnancy center, advising young women that there were options to the abortions promoted by the Coast's large contingent of liberal feminists who, at the time, were operating their own pro-abortion women's shelter in Fort Bragg.

The pro-abortion shelter was called CAARE or Community Assistance for Assault and Rape Emergency. CAARE had been established in Fort Bragg in 1978 to assist victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. It was defunct by July of 1990 because of internal conflicts among its directors, several of whom teamed up against Sandra Henderson, the center's young bookkeeper, to bring false charges of embezzlement against her to disguise CAARE's incompetent management.

CAARE had obtained an array of public grants and was sanctioned by the local courts. The county’s judges routinely assigned Coast victims of domestic violence to stay at CAARE. The women who dominated CAARE's board of directors were and are active in Coast politics with the Democratic Party. But CAARE, ironically, was not popular with traditional Fort Bragg because, like the Orr Sisters, it was dominated by women viewed as unconventional and, it isn't unfair to say, so rabidly hostile to men that one CAARE staffer refused to include roosters among her flock of backyard chickens.

There was indeed a perceptible anti-male bias at CAARE. As one Fort Bragg man assigned to CAARE by the courts for family counseling put it: "They weren't trying to get me and my wife back together; they were trying to get my wife to leave me."

Pam Hudson, at the height of her fame and influence as an expert on the non-existent phenomenom of child abuse in Satanist settings would be celebrated by CAARE as its "Woman of the Year."

The CAARE women didn't like the Orr Sisters. Even if the Orrs were independent women, they weren't the right kind of independent women with the right kind of "left" politics prevalent on the Mendocino Coast. Nevermind that the Orr Sisters were caring for fractured parents and their disturbed children round-the-clock, and providing work for some of their mothers downtown at the Jubilation Cafe, the Orrs were opposed to abortion and thus enemies of good.

The Orr Sisters were too busy to hear the building gossip about them. It wasn't until they were between an unyielding rock of self-appointed Satan fighters and a very hard place of an unsympathetic and influential bloc of Mendocino Coast liberals, that they began to realize they'd become targets for a virtual mother lode of irrational fears.

"All the local liberal women who were in that mindset," Barbara Orr remembers, " all the pro-abortion ladies, wouldn't come to the restaurant any more; they were boycotting me. And then I got a cook in there who...I don't know... was irresponsible, and one day the microwave blew up, and I closed the restaurant. It had been open for 18 months."

Excited gossip that the sisters were operating a devil's playground on Airport Road continued to circulate, and as the rumors circulated they became ever more dire. And vile. The rumors said that children were being molested and murdered out on Airport Road! Right here in Fort Bragg!

The nightly news of the time was dominated by accounts of uniquely perverse crimes alleged to have been committed against children at a daycare center in Manhattan Beach, the upscale ocean view Los Angeles suburb. The targetted daycare providers were a respectable family named McMartin who'd lived in the town since the end of World War Two. The McMartin family's sudden descent into grotesque unwholesomeness caught Manhattan Beach, and the nation, by surprise. How could it be? Not only were the McMartins long-time residents of the town, the quality of their daycare was so widely esteemed that two generations of upwardly mobile parents signed waiting lists to get their children into the home. McMartin's was the place in Manhattan Beach for daycare.

But suddenly the McMartins were not only a band of dedicated devil worshippers who managed to celebrate Satan in between Big Bird and Graham Crackers, according to the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, the McMartins, out of devotion to Satan, sexually violated their toddler clientele and probably murdered anonymous mystery children on site!

Fervent reports of similarly evil events involving very young children soon rocked American communities from Coos Bay to Boston. Prosecutions of alleged Satanist child molesters were underway in all regions of the United States. Men and women — mostly women — were being packed off to prison on the testimony of pre-schoolers with the children's vague but gory accounts backed up by an improbable alliance of ambitious prosecutors, dim social workers, opportunistic therapists, and unsophisticated parents intent upon branding their ex-mates and their children's daycare providers as perverts. Satan hadn't

enjoyed this kind of success since a sexually obsessed preacher in Salem, Massachusetts named Cotton Mather managed to talk his flock into hanging 19 female congregants as witches.

Two hundred years after Cotton Mather, Barbara Orr, recalls her Fort Bragg flock.

"I had a lot of women and men come and ask to stay at my house who were victims of domestic violence because they just didn't agree with the policy and the spiritualness of the CAARE project. CAARE to be honest," Orr continues, "they were people who identified themselves as gay. A lot of the people who came to live at Jubilation were very intimidated by them and didn't agree with their policies. So a number of these people stayed at my house with their kids. I had men as well who had been battered. And Dr. Kehoe — Dan Kehoe — made a lot of referrals of his patients because I dealt well with autistic children. I also had some kids in my day care because their parents wanted their children to experience people unlike themselves. That's why they brought them there. I thought that was pretty neat. I cared for children of all ages up to twelve. A lot of the kids were dropped off at night and on the weekends because we were just about the only place parents could do that in Fort Bragg."

Looking back, Barbara Orr doesn't hesitate to place blame.

"The disturbed parents of a few of the disturbed children I cared for at Jubilation started the whole thing," she says. "The woman who really got it going was in a huge custody fight with her ex-husband. Her child had been kidnapped twice by the father and taken to LA. And we got him back; I helped her get her son back. I was going to pay her and her son's way to Hawaii, and help them get established there to get away from the situation here in Fort Bragg, but it all backfired. The little boy told his mother, a very young woman who had already been married several times, that he'd been abused when he was with his father by a guy in a cowboy hat at a fence near a barn. I didn't have a cowboy hat at Jubilation, but I had a barn and a fence, so I guess that was close enough."

“The woman who really got it going “was named Heidi. She got mad at Barbara Orr for reasons so childishly vague that no one could ever quite figure out what they were. Heidi began spreading McMartin-like tales that the Orr Sisters were not only devil worshippers, they were sacrificing Fort Bragg's children on Satan's very alter. It was Heidi’s little boy, Heidi claimed, who had been molested by a man wearing a cowboy hat at a fence near a barn, ergo Jubilation Day Care Center on Airport Road.

At the same time the little boy informed his frazzled mother of his imagined encounter with the cowboy, another child told his parent that Kelly Orr, age 8, had been playing a kind of kid's sexual show and tell with a small boy named Chris Bird, age 6.

The great Fort Bragg Witch Hunt was underway.

"It's like flashes, fast-moving pictures to me now," Kelly Orr says from the safe distance of adulthood. "I had never met my father before so I thought that day the police came, as a child would think, ‘Oh, they must have found my dad.’ I remember the texture of the chairs that we had. I remember having my hair half done because we were going to a piano concert in Fort Bragg. My friend Mary Beth and I were getting ready to go into town. And I remember being about six inches away from the officer and not understanding. I vividly remember the officer reading me my rights. It's etched and stamped on my brain. I remember my mother crying, and I remember the officer asking me if I understood, and I remember saying yes. I remember my mother telling me to be honest."

It was a winter night in 1983. Two Mendocino County Sheriff's Department deputies named Jack Stapleton and Fred Lima had appeared at the front door of the Jubilation Day Care Center on Airport Road. The deputies had come to investigate a complaint alleging that Kelly Orr, age 8, had molested a young boy by the name of Chris Bird, age 6.

"We were getting the kids ready to go into town for a concert the night it happened," Barbara remembers. "The two deputies talked to Sharon first. Suddenly I heard Sharon crying, and I knew something bad had happened. I didn't know what."

Little Kelly didn't know what, either. She thought deputies Stapleton and Lima had good news for her. She thought they'd found her dad. But the police hadn't found Kelly’s father. They'd come to interrogate Airport Road's youngest witch.

"What happened was," Kelly begins, "my friend Jasmine, who was two months younger than me — and I was told she would never get in trouble because she was younger than I was — was the one who started it. We used to sleep together in the same bed, and we would sometimes touch each other. There was no penetration or anything like that. It wasn't like I was sexually active. And one of the boys who lived on the property with his mother would take naps with us. His name was Mike. He gave us hickeys, which we thought were the coolest things in the world. I can remember the mat that we slept on. It was a blue and gold mat, like an aerobics mat. We slept on that. I certainly wasn't a sexual predator. Jasmine and I thought hickeys were fun."

Before she was transformed by local hysterics into Lucifer's little helper, Kelly Orr remembers her Airport Road as an idyllic place "like a little communal farm where we raised some of our own food and where a lot of single women and little kids lived with us."

Deputies Lima and Stapleton concluded that there had been some low-intensity sex play among children and referred the case to the Mendocino County Department of Social Services.

"I had to go to therapy," Kelly remembers. "I was called a liar a lot. I told my mother that everything I knew

about sex I learned from a Penthouse magazine my friend Jasmine and I found in the middle of the road one day when we were riding our bikes. We took it to our secret little hiding place, a bunch of trees. It's such a shock to a little kid to see adults in the nude and doing what they were doing in Penthouse. Even my mom didn't believe I knew about oral sex from Penthouse, but we had given each other hickeys and felt each other up at nap time, but we certainly weren't performing oral sex on each other."

Mendocino County's therapists, apparently close readers of Penthouse, told the little girl that there were no depictions of oral sex in the magazine, that Kelly must have learned of the act by participating in it. These helping professionals wanted to help Kelly by taking her away from her mother, and they wanted to put Kelly’s mom and Kelly’s aunt Sharon out of the daycare business.

Kelly's besieged mother, Barbara shakes her head disbelievingly.

"I've tried to forget it, but I remember them taking Kelly to the police station and soon after people started calling us up and saying they were going to kill Kelly for molesting their children. An 8-year-old doesn't molest children. It was play, that's all. But with everything going on out there at the time, the McMartin case on television every day, we were all scared. We stayed with friends for a while east of Fort Bragg when we lost the place on Airport Road. The three of us had to go to counseling with Pam Hudson, and I remember Pam Hudson warning me that if I didn't turn Kelly over to the county voluntarily, the state would take her away."

Which is what the state did.

"'What's going to happen next, mom?' Kelly would ask me," Barbara says, the pain of the memory audible in her voice. "Pam Hudson said Kelly was a sexual predator, that she needed special, full-time therapy. Then the cops and Pam were saying that Sharon had taught Kelly all this stuff, and they'd play good cop, bad cop with us. They'd take Sharon and me in different cars and say, 'Well, your sister did such and such. Why don't you just say she did?' I was in shock."

The rumors of vast evils on Airport Road increased with the police visit to Jubilation. Little Kelly Orr was designated witch-in-training by the gossips, and the campaign against her aunt and her mother picked up momentum.

Barbara and Sharon Orr hadn’t noticed that they'd become the inspiration for the most vile, most implausible rumors the community's most malicious and disturbed persons could conjure. They had no idea that they were sponsors of ceremonial child molestation and committed expediters of infanticide. Fort Bragg's sea-crisp air fairly crackled with the kind of demented talk a small American community hadn't heard since the Salem Witch Trials.

Somehow, the breathless gossip went, in between the comings and goings of unsuspecting Jubilation daycare parents on busy, transparent Airport Road, Satan's highly efficient ground crew would load Jubilation’s pre-schoolers into a Georgia-Pacific helicopter and fly them up the Mendocino Coast where Beelzebub's Fort Bragg

worshippers would sexually abuse them as part of their mid-day devotionals. Sometimes an anonymous infant "bred for the purpose" was ritualistically butchered as part of the services. When church was out the tots re-boarded G-P's helicopter and were flown back to daycare at 32800 Airport Road in plenty of time for their unwitting parents to pick them up.

In less logistically complicated, non-corporate, and un-airborne versions of this grotesquely improbable scenario, pre-schoolers were sexually molested in Satanist rituals at the Airport Road daycare center itself. During these sessions, men and women, lavishly outfitted in medieval costumes, paid their respects to Lucifer in ceremonies featuring the ritualistic slaughter of infants or, when infants were in short supply, animals, whose remains were then quickly buried on the three-acre premises.

Mendocino County Sheriff Tony Craver, a supervising sergeant with the Sheriff's Department in 1983, laughs as he remembers Fort Bragg's great Satanist hysteria.

"Oh yeah," Craver snorts. "To give you an idea of what we had to investigate, the mother of a 4-year-old told me her child, 'who does not lie,' up around Abalobadiah off Highway One, the boy was taken by submarine to an amusement park in a secret cavern under the bluffs where he was forced to perform in pornographic movies. It was all I could do to stay on my chair while mom told me all this. We couldn't find one shard of evidence to support any of the accusations going around. Kids — little kids — would say things like, 'Debbie killed Bobby, and then she poured blood all over him and he would be ok again.’ Lots of mothers actually believed this Twilight Zone stuff. It was blown out of all proportion."

The McMartin case fell apart when its instigator, a disturbed woman by the name of Judy Johnson, was found to be clinically insane. Heidi was Fort Bragg's Judy Johnson, at least initially. There came to be lots of Judy Johnsons in Mendocino County. One of the Judys, Pam Hudson, the child therapist employed by the Mendocino County Department of Mental Health, happened to be backed by civil authority. She had the power to take your child away from you. The most lurid of the accusations against the Orr Sisters were obviously coming from Hudson's fevered imagination and the dim, credulous minds of Hudson's allies in the Social Services Department.

And from them, the accusations were getting into the Fort Bragg community where they became even more dramatically implausible.

Child Protective Services’ Fort Bragg office added substantially to the mounting hysteria when it sent out letters to parents — except those known to be friends of the Orrs — warning them to be alert for “certain signs” in their children that they’d been sexually molested.

Pam Hudson was already convinced that Satan himself was working through Kelly Orr, while Mrs. Duff of Social Services agreed that Kelly was obviously a dwarf pervert who required institutional retooling.

Barbara Orr soon lost her Airport Road property. Her daycare business had collapsed and her life savings she'd invested in it and the property were gone. Little Kelly had been taken away from her mother and stuck away in Trinity School, Ukiah, and the sisters had left town. Their many enemies said the Orr Sisters had run away because they were guilty. But the Orr Sisters left town because they were afraid they’d be killed. People were calling them at all hours with threats to kill and rape Kelly Orr. And Sharon and Barbara were often menaced when they went into town to shop. One heroic defender of Fort Bragg’s children, male type, approached Barbara in distant Hopland where she'd found work in a restaurant to warn Barbara he'd kill her if she didn't leave Mendocino County.

A large part of Fort Bragg believed that the sisters were witches, perverts, and baby killers. The DA, and the

Social Services and Mental Health departments were piling on as if these preposterous accusations were true, and Judge Conrad Cox of the Mendocino County Superior Court had just sanctioned the whole evil show by signing little Kelly Orr over to Trinity School.

"I had to grow up pretty quickly," Kelly says of her institutional experience in Ukiah. "I was always on my best behavior at Trinity because I wanted to get out of there, but it took seven months before I was back with my mom. I didn't say anything to anybody about what happened to me at Trinity until four or five years later. I look back now and it's like a separate life; like a movie. I can't even describe how I think about the past. We had friends who stood by us, and I'm still close to some people who live in Fort Bragg today, but I don't know of anyone who said publicly that what was happening to us was wrong. It took me a long time to heal, to get over it."

Kelly Orr says she can remember "being embarrassed by anatomically correct dolls. The therapist would ask, 'Where did you touch him?' I was so embarrassed. And I really clammed up. I didn't know what was going on so I didn't really want to talk. They all treated me as if I were a sexual offender, like I did this to every child at Jubilation, which was my home too after all, and that I had some kind of devil's scheme programmed into my brain to prey on all of the other kids."

(full page cartoon of demented therapists with their anatomically correct teddy bears)

"Someone left a severed goat's head at Trinity's front door just after I got there," Kelly remembers, "and I myself was molested by one of the boys who took me up on the roof to do it. But Jean Smith, a lady who was kind of a housemother at Trinity, recognized right away that I shouldn't have been away from my mom. Mrs. Smith watched over me and would take me to her house to spend time with her family whenever she could. My mom had given me her special quilt when I went into Trinity, and it's gone everywhere with me ever since. We were never emotionally disconnected; that was a good thing. I was able to get out of Trinity in seven months, but I had to grow up very fast at Trinity, and it took my mom and me a long time to get over it. I've been very lucky. I've lived three lives, basically: my pre-California life, my California life, and then afterwards. I'm just happy that I haven't lost faith in God, and I feel that I'm lucky to have healed and that I

have such a fantastic mother. I owe my mother so much. She's an amazing woman."

The Orr Sisters hired Ukiah attorney Maryann Villwock to defend them against the gathering wolves, but Villwock's services ranged from incompetent to non-existent.

"She just told us to go along, don't make anybody mad," Barbara says in assessing Villwock’s legal representation.

A staunch friend of Barbara Orr's, is still angry about what happened to Barbara and Sharon.

"I was young and dumb," the friend — who prefers to remain anonymous — says. "I was married to a very violent man who was having a terrible influence on my little boy, so I went to North Coast Opportunities and they recommended that I send him to daycare with the Orrs. About a month of him going to daycare out there he became independent and happy. When I got the letter from the so-called therapist talking about 'if your child exhibits unusual behavior' and all the rest of it, I called her and said How dare you do that. She told me my child didn't have to come in. I knew nothing happened out there. It was all a very creative diversion for Fort Bragg."

"The whole thing produced a great deal of money," the friend maintains, "for the mental health system and the cops. I've heard about a million dollars in grants. I know that there were solid people who knew this Satanist stuff was a lot of you-know-what, but the fear it created was real that if you didn't get on the bandwagon they might go after your kids. Most of us stood back even though I was very supportive of Barbara. She saved my son. Without her help, I would have lost him. My parenting skills were blithering. Barbara just stepped in and said this is how you do it. This is the way to be a mom, and this is the way you're going to do it, and I did it. She was the only person who helped me when I really needed help."

"Finally," Barbara says with an audible sigh, "I was able to get Kelly's case transferred out of Mendocino County to Lake County. A social worker named Sherry Pruitt Gregory said right away that Kelly did not belong at Trinity, that she belonged with me. And Kelly's psychiatrist, an older woman named Claire Frederick, backed Sherry up; she said Kelly should never have been placed with Trinity School, that there was nothing wrong with her. And inside Trinity itself, a very nice lady who worked with Kelly said she would testify that Kelly had no business in a closed facility for disturbed children. She protected Kelly as much as possible from the other kids."

"I was delivering newspapers early in the morning and I got a job with an Indian program tutoring kids," Barbara recalls of her harrowing Lake County limbo. "I did the tutoring in the library, but I always kept the door open so if anybody was watching me they couldn't accuse me of witchcraft or whatever. I also got up every morning at 3 o'clock to deliver newspapers and I'd pray and I'd cry the hundred miles around the lake. I didn't know what was happening."

Judge John Golden of the Lake County Superior Court knew what was happening. He knew exactly what was happening. And the judge was outraged when Kelly Orr's case landed in his court. Barbara says that day in court was one of the few gratifying memories she has of her long ordeal in Ecotopia, the self-advertised center of progressive politics and general enlightenment that is liberal Mendocino County.

"The people from Trinity got up and said that because we were Catholics we made Kelly ashamed of sex and so forth."

Judge Golden listened to the crackpot theorizing from Trinity School’s kid-rehab experts, then he studied the even more implausible reports from Mendocino County's tax-paid therapists, and ordered Kelly immediately returned to her mother.

"The judge said ‘immediately’, not the next day, that same afternoon," Barbara Orr remembers of that glorious morning in Lakeport. "Finally, after more than two years of this stuff an official had the sense to say it was all a lot of craziness."

But Kelly Orr's reign as Lucifer’s junior lady-in-waiting wasn't to end for ten more years. She finally had to hire a lawyer to get her name removed from a national roster of sex offenders, only learning that she was on the list when she applied for a job working with children. Kelly has since picked up the psychological pieces from her wrenching years in Mendocino County, obtaining a college degree; she plans to go on to graduate school to become, of all things, a social worker.

Speaking from the safety of years and distance from the terrifying events of her stolen Fort Bragg childhood, Kelly puts the terrors of her broken childhood in optimistic perspective.

"I think my experience will make me a good social worker," Kelly says. "I almost think of Fort Bragg like it was a separate life."

Kelly's aunt is less sanguine.

"I was put on probation by State Licensing," Sharon Orr says, "for lack of proper supervision. They also alleged that I wasn't at the site as much as I should be as director, which wasn't true; I lived there after all. But what freaked me out the most were the anonymous phone calls from men who threatened to rape Kelly 'to see how she likes it,' and from women who said things like, 'I hope they put Kelly away forever.' A child! Can you believe it?"

Gary Hudson wastes no time pointing out that he is not related to the Pam Hudson of the County's Mental Health Department who parlayed the pursuit of the Orr Sisters into a career for herself as an expert on the ritualistic abuse of children. Hudson the cop is a native of

Fort Bragg. He's presently Under-Sheriff, number two man in the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department.

"Everything proceeded from the allegations against Kelly for molesting young children," Hudson says. He cites interest in "ritualistic activity" began when a small group of Mendocino teenagers attracted police attention for killing small animals in what appeared to be their version of devil worship. There were also local episodes of animal sacrifice arising from Caribbean witchcraft practices known as Santeria. These episodes prompted calls to the Sheriff's Department to investigate.

Mendocino County's Santerians were graduates of the infamous Mariel Boat Lift of 1980 when Fidel Castro off-loaded thousands of his most committed criminals and mental patients in Miami. Some of these Cuban crooks made their way to Mendocino County where, with characteristic ruthlessness, they quickly established themselves in the drug trade. The Cubans seemed to know instantly that they were in an accommodatingly unwary jurisdiction where they could obscure their dope businesses with their religion, which they said was called Santeria. The Cubans weren't criminals, you see, they were spiritual seekers no different than the many other seekers who call Mendocino County home.

Hudson chuckles.

"My favorite headline from Rolling Stone magazine was the one on the last interview with Anton LaVey," he says. "It's hard to be evil when the whole world has gone to hell," LaVey had said. A self-proclaimed devil worshipper, the witty Satanist was considered a major weirdo even in the context of San Francisco where he maintained a highly publicized “Satanist” church.

With witches, witchcraft and the devil much in the news, Gary Hudson was dispatched by Mendocino County to Satanist seminars aimed at getting the local police up to speed on the newest wrinkle in Mendo weirdness. Hudson now talks knowledgeably of such mystic arcania as

Wiccans and the Temple of Set, pointing out that the Sheriff's Department, at the time, was under a lot of pressure to link the prevalent Satanist allegations against the Orr Sisters' Fort Bragg Jubilation Day Care Center with the Presidio Day Care case then raging in San Francisco and the McMartin case making headlines in Manhattan Beach.

"Basically," Hudson says, "I learned to investigate ritualistic cases like they were accounting crimes, learning the belief systems to be able to identify suspects. What could be a reasonable explanation for what was being alleged? It's very difficult interviewing children anyway because their sense of time has to be put in a context of events in their own lives, such as birthdays and maybe a visit to a relative's house."

Because the Satanist hysteria’s primary informants were mostly children under the age of 8, it meant that police investigators had to rely on literally hysterical parents and freshly anointed experts like Pam Hudson as translators.

"There can't be a prosecution of children under 14 unless they have clear knowledge of the wrongfulness of their acts," the Sheriff's Department's Hudson clarifies, well aware that the alleged lead perp in the Jubilation case was 8 years old.

"There were a number of allegations against Jubilation," Hudson says, "but none of them were sustained. What it all came down to was that the only thing that might have been prosecutable involved Kelly Orr, and there was nothing there, really. When we assessed the opportunities for this kind of thing to occur out at their place on Airport Road, and added up everything we had, it wasn't enough. And the primary witness in all of it flaked out. She took off, literally disappeared into Los Angeles. It was clear to us that we couldn't have her testify anyway because she was so erratic."

The case faded "for lack of additional investigative leads," Hudson says, before adding, "but it's not officially closed. We still have a box or two of reports sitting in records. The kids, through their parents, made allegations of some pretty serious crimes. The reports focused on these allegations made by children, statements by their parents, records of searches, surveillance by people from the State Department of Justice, search warrants served. We invested a tremendous amount of time and resources on it. We piled up reams of reports, photographs, tapes. Technically, it's still an active case, but it's not likely to be revived."

Her therapy sessions with Kelly Orr had convinced Pam Hudson of the Mendocino County Mental Health Department that Satan had established a major outpost in Fort Bragg. But it was Hudson herself who seemed in dire need of therapy. She was becoming more and more erratic, a fact her supervisors and colleagues didn't seem to notice.

A person who attended the same Fort Bragg church as Pam Hudson remembered, "I think it was late in 1983 that Pam would get up at Sunday services and say, 'You've got to stop the abuse of innocent children by Satanist cults.' We didn't know what she was talking about until the McMartin case was in the news everyday. But Pam said it was happening here in Fort Bragg, too. The congregation thought she was nuts. She was obsessed by the devil."

In her capacity as a child therapist for the county, Hudson honed in on a number of children who'd been cared for at Jubilation. They and their unhinged parents became her case studies, her research tools. Hudson was convinced that the Jubilation Day Care kids were the devil's very own victims.

By early 1987, having hounded the Orr Sisters out of Fort Bragg and into hiding, Hudson had parlayed her expertise on the ritual abuse of children into national recognition as an authority on an entirely mythical phenomenon.

By 1988, devil-fighting had gone mainstream. A meeting organized by an ad hoc Mendocino County group called "Victims of Ritual Abuse" was convened at Ukiah High School. Pam Hudson was the keynote speaker. Dale McCulley of Potter Valley was also a presenter. A skeptic jotted down the topics discussed: "Satanic signs: heavy metal music; unidentified bones; free sex and drug parties; animal mutilations; blood drinking; sodomy; oral copulation; venereal disease; rabies; masks; fear; death themes; cannibalism; blasphemy; coffins; graveyards; mortuaries; Kenneth Parnell; Tree Frog Johnson; Leonard Lake and Charles Ng; Charles Manson; Rev. Jim Jones; Guyana; 22 children allegedly molested at Jubilation Day Care Center; animal abuse; erotic dancing; fear of bathing; nightmares; night sweats; bed wetting; fear of separation; aggression; eating disorders; catsup; fear of dark; vomiting and abdominal pain; memory gaps; child group sex; child molesters; kid cages; threats of abuse of parents; live burials; children held under water; fear of the water; fear of being filmed or photographed; children suspended by ropes from the ceiling; drugged children; children poked in anus, eyes, under tongue or between toes; closets; robes; candles; feces-eating and urine-drinking."

A good time was had by all.

That same year, Peter Page of the Ukiah Daily Journal, published this straight-faced report on the phenomena:

“Two dozen children over the past three years have told a Mendocino County therapist of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse they suffered in satanic rituals.

Pam Hudson, a therapist in private practice and with the county Mental Health for 19 years, said in the past three years she has treated 17 children, and interviewed seven others, who have described bizarre rituals involving torture, sexual violation and blood sacrifice. All but one of the children lived in the Fort Bragg area. Hudson is certain she has not talked to all the children abused by the cult. The molestations were initially revealed in 1984 and 1985, she said. Hudson said she has finally "broken the silence" about satanism because of her concerns that cults are gaining in power and audacity. 'My point is there is a movement that is very complex and very sinister that has already struck close to home,' she said. 'It is my opinion that (satanism) is making inroads in America's adolescent population, not all of them, but some.' Hudson recently lectured on her treatment of ritual abuse victims at the Langley-Porter Psychiatric Institute at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. She has been invited to address other mental health professionals next September. 'There are a large number of therapists who know what these children are saying but they aren't speaking out,' she complained. 'The traumatized children were painfully slow to reveal the abuse to parents and therapists. The perpetrators frightened the children into silence and tried to convince them they had no hope of being believed,' Hudson said. The young victims claim they were hung by their feet, forced into ritualistic cannibalism, and compelled to witness the slaughter of animals. Four children described the ritual murder of infants. Hudson is convinced at least two infant killings occurred because the four children corroborated two different stories. Some of the children reported seeing a baby shot, some reported an infant was stabbed, and some of the children said they were forced to stab a baby. As recently as last week an adult woman contacted Hudson and told her of forced participation in the murder of an infant on the East Coast. The ritual described was strikingly similar to what the children in Fort Bragg related. 'Many children and adults throughout the United States are reporting human sacrifice at these rituals,' Hudson said. All the children were brought to Hudson by parents concerned about shocking changes in their behavior, such as 'night terrors,' which are extreme nightmares from which the children cannot be easily awakened. In some instances, the children screamed and pleaded hysterically in their sleep night after night. Nothing in her many years of treating young victims of sexual molestation and physical abuse prepared Hudson for the trauma these children suffered, she said. 'I have never seen these strange, abrupt personality behaviors, and this total terror,' Hudson said. Some parents began suspecting their children had been abused when they exhibited inappropriate sexual behavior or spoke of their bodies in an inexplicably sexual fashion, Hudson said. 'These children have been eroticized. They are corrupted in that sense,' she said. The children's stress was compounded because they were put in the abusive situation, albeit unknowingly, by their parents. Most, but not all, of the children Hudson has treated were enrolled in the now-defunct Jubilation Day Care Center in Fort Bragg. The owner of the Center, Barbara Orr, surrendered her license to operate a daycare facility in December 1985 rather than fight accusations that children in her care were sexually abused. She has since left Mendocino County and could not be located to discuss this article. State regulators moved to close the facility after learning that children had been physically and sexually abused by Orr's niece. The facility's license had been suspended earlier because of the same activities and Orr had been ordered to keep her niece away from the children. Public documents filed by investigators claim that children were molested over a three-year period, although it makes no mention of ritual abuse. The perpetrators used the inherent unbelievability of the abuse to heighten the child's sense of helplessness, Hudson said. 'They purposely make their rituals bizarre so the children would not be believed,' she said. 'They tell the kids they will be disbelieved, and when they are (not believed), they (the children) believe the other people.' The children were routinely threatened with the death of themselves, their parents or their pets if they revealed what had happened. The children Hudson treated have told of being molested by at least a half dozen different adult men and women, plus older children. At different times the molesters were dressed as police officers, or in robes, or in animal costumes.  'It is a rather common part of paganism and satanism to have masked figures,' Hudson said. A lengthy investigation of the daycare center by two Mendocino County sheriff's deputies yielded a report about 500 pages in length. District Attorney Susan Massini said the investigation uncovered reports, usually secondhand through parents, of ritualistic child sexual abuse similar to a pattern becoming familiar to police and prosecutors nationwide. 'The stories are consistent with information we have been getting as it relates to cult activity and ritual abuse of children,' Massini said. 'It has some of the same overtones.' Despite the lengthy investigation there has never been any prosecution for child molestation stemming from the Jubilation Day Care Center. Former District Attorney Vivian Rackauckas, who was in office when the allegations first surfaced, said she declined to prosecute the case because the 3- or 4-year old victims 'were too young to competently testify.'"

Not a single person in a position of authority ever publicly denounced Mendocino County's satanist hysteria for what it was.

The Mendo devil rasslers tended to be chronic substance abusers and/or persons suffering what psychiatrists call "personality disorders." Barbara and Sharon Orr's accusers fell heavily into the substance abuser-disturbed person category. These miscellaneous dysfunctionals compelled their children to claim that they had been sexually abused in rituals celebrating the devil.

A belief system prevalent on the Northcoast among is the widespread "feminist" notion among both men and women that women, historical victims of Christian "patriarchy," are more sensitive to the natural world than men. There are spiritually committed women on the Northcoast loosely affiliated with or organized into covens of "Wiccans"— or New Age witches. They lead solstice celebrations and other warm weather rituals on many a Northcoast ridgetop.

These retro festivals are typically little more than hippie costume parties, but they are evidence of the tendency among educated people of the influence on non-rational belief systems. Neo-mystic crackpots of the Starhawk type, for instance, are not only influential in the local environmental movement, they're ubiquitous at the area's pseudo-public radio stations. A red diaper baby whose given name is Miriam Simos, Starhawk, along with a woman who calls herself The Rabbi of the Redwoods, were featured speakers at Headwaters demonstrations in the Redwood Summer period, circa 1990. The politics of the Wiccans, the pagans, and the new mystics, is a  humorless mishmash of tepidly liberal social principles, druidic gibberish, male-bashing feminism, and self-pity.

Rhetoric about love, compassion and the defense of women notwithstanding, the Orr Sisters were abandoned by the Coast's feminist sisterhood, many of whom occupied public jobs with the helping bureaucracies. People who should have known better stood aside as Fort Bragg hysterics, inspired by the constant television accounts of the McMartin case, stepped up their campaign against the Orrs. The area's churches? Not a public word. Barbara, Sharon and little Kelly were on their own. Not a single person rose to publicly defend the Orrs, and not a single person on the Northcoast, public or private, denounced the Satanist phenomena for the laughable but evil fraud that it was.

The persecution didn't end with the Orr Sisters bankrupt and hounded out of Fort Bragg and Mendocino County. A small group of Fort Bragg people have stalked the Orrs ever since, following them all the way to Illinois to cause Barbara and Sharon untold trouble over the years. Barbara has lost several jobs because of her fanatic pursuers.

"I was working with mentally retarded adults," Barbara says indignantly, "and someone called and told the people in charge about what had happened in California and they fired me. I took them to the Labor Board, but they never would say who told them what about me. And someone called the dean of my graduate school and told them the California story and I was almost kicked out of school on the basis of what? These rumors from Fort Bragg."

Sharon Orr has been similarly victimized by her long-distance enemies.

"They found out where we lived back here," she says, "and turned us in because my sister Barbara was watching some of our cousin's kids and I had a foster home. One day, the welfare people came and took the kids away from me without even bothering to explain to me what had happened. I found out that nothing had happened except someone had called from California and fed the welfare people a line about ritual abuse. That's all it took. My license was gone."

Sharon Orr has recently fought off cancer. Barbara Orr, now 48, last worked as a census taker and is in poor

health.

Barbara has visited Fort Bragg several times since she and her sister were literally run out of town, but Sharon Orr "tries not to even think about Mendocino County."

Pam Hudson, the author of the crimes against the Orr Sisters and other innocent women, was aggressively defended throughout by her colleagues and supervisors even after the Satanist hysteria had been irrefutably debunked. Hudson and her friends hunkered down in her downtown Fort Bragg home on Sanderson Street. In 1994, Hudson was felled by a series of aneurysms and has been cared for at the Sherwood Oaks Convalescent Hospital in Fort Bragg where she died in 2008. "She said the devil had struck her down," an acquaintance remembers.

Kelly Orr went to see Pam Hudson at Sherwood Oaks when Kelly was in Fort Bragg to visit the few friends who'd stood by her mother and her aunt during their tax-funded persecution by Mendocino County. Kelly asked Pam, "Do you remember me when I was a little girl? I came to you, Pam, and I needed help and you didn't help me."

"Pam touched my cheek and said, 'You turned out so beautifully. You're so beautiful now’."