Cult of Madness

None of the defendants named in this story would comment. Lawyer Rock Grundman, the husband of counselor Mary Ellen Grundman, who treated Hurt at Charter, claims lawyers interested solely in financial gain cooked up Hurt's case. "You've seen a few cases over the years that have come down with enormous verdicts, and that leads to many lawyers trying to imitate them," says Grundman, who is representing his wife. "And that has led to testimony from people who appear to have qualifications who are willing to talk for large fees about something which they have no or little knowledge."

Chris Barden, a Minnesota psychologist and Harvard-educated lawyer, has made a career of successfully suing therapists in multiple personality disorder cases and is helping Hurt pursue her case. He says experts believe Hurt's is one of the worst cases of abuse they have seen, for in the course of losing her mind, she lost her parents, her husband, and her children.

"What these therapists tell people is that they have no free will, that something that might have happened 30 years ago is controlling their lives today," Barden says. "They destroy families, and that is not just junk science, it's evil."

In late 1990, Martha Hurt was a 32-year-old Arlington homemaker with marital problems. Bobby Gene Hurt, her high school sweetheart and husband of 12 years, was growing distant from her and their three adopted children. A maintenance manager at Vought Grumman, Bobby had an explosive temper, lashing out at his family over seemingly inconsequential things.

The Hurts attended marital counseling, but progress was slow. Depressed and overwhelmed by raising three children, ages 3, 9, and 10, with little support, Hurt, who also worked proofreading legal transcripts at home, could not dig herself out of the emotional hole in which she found herself.

The marriage counselor suggested she try an antidepressant and referred her to Dr. Kathleen Stanley, an Arlington psychiatrist. In the course of treating her, Stanley helped convince Hurt that her troubles stemmed not from marital discord, but from a history of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by her parents -- memories of which she had buried. With Stanley's help, Hurt suddenly dredged up in amazing and damning detail those long-forgotten memories.

Under Stanley's care, Hurt's condition rapidly deteriorated. Hospitalized in a psychiatric unit with incest survivors, Hurt began recalling even more lurid episodes of childhood sexual abuse. After confronting her parents and several of her siblings with the details of her newly recovered memories, which they emphatically denied, Hurt attempted suicide twice.

Matters soon became more sinister -- and more improbable. Richardson psychologist Stephen Ash concluded that Hurt was not just an incest survivor, but had also been the victim of her family's satanic cult. Ash also concluded that Hurt suffered from multiple personality disorder.

The treatment for MPD, Ash explained, was draconian and protracted -- typically seven to 10 years of intensive work, during which the therapist, using hypnosis, would help call forth as many of her various personalities -- or alters -- as possible and get them to divulge the abuse they had suffered or perpetrated. To aid in her supposed recovery, Ash devoted sessions to having Hurt re-enact such gruesome scenes as stabbing her newborn baby in the chest, carving out its heart, and eating it.

When Hurt balked at the treatment, Ash told her, "You have to remember in order to forget." This was a variation on the theme she would hear repeatedly over the years from all her therapists -- "You will get worse before you get better."

And worse she got. In January 1992, she again became suicidal and was hospitalized, this time at Charter Hospital in Plano, which had recently opened a special unit for the treatment of multiple personalities. During two months-long hospitalizations there, she mutilated her body and tried to take her life.

Hurt's life was in shambles, her sleep disrupted by nightmares, her waking hours consumed by her illness. Zoned out on a powerful stew of medications, she spent most of her days mapping her alternate personalities -- even her husband learned how to call them out. Under Ash, Hurt discovered about 12 different alters including Mawsa, her inner child who was ordered to do the devil's work; 13-year-old Marty, a tough cookie who took no guff from anyone; Augustus, the high priestess of the cult; and Stephen, the alter that was responsible for mutilating Hurt's body.

Though her life was careening out of control, she at least believed she was getting the best care available. The head of her treatment -- in fact, the head of the entire MPD unit at Charter -- was Dr. Colin Ross, an internationally known expert in the field of multiple personalities. Originally from Canada, Ross was president and one of the founding members of the International Society of the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation. He wrote and lectured widely on the subject.