Cult of Madness

Perhaps the hardest thing for her to cope with was the belief that she had killed her own babies. Her therapist's records say she recalled giving birth to six babies, starting at age 9. Had her doctors bothered to check her medical records, they would have learned she didn't reach puberty until age 12.

But it was all painfully real to Hurt. "All my life, I wanted to have a baby. The most devastating thing you could tell me was that I had a baby and killed it, ate it, and drank the baby's blood. I thought I was the most evil thing on the face of the earth and didn't deserve to live."

Now a psychologist in Greensboro, North Carolina, Ash said in a deposition he believed there was a chance -- between zero and 50 percent -- that Hurt's memories of ritual abuse were delusional. But at the time, when Hurt was attempting to qualify for Medicare as 100 percent disabled, he sent a letter to a federal disability examiner saying he had "no doubt" that Hurt was a multiple personality disorder with a satanic-abuse and incest-abuse background.

In the MPD unit, Hurt discovered from other patients that it was not typical for a therapist to quote the Bible or cast out demons. She spoke to Ross, whom she considered "a god."

Handsome and charismatic, Ross had written several textbooks on MPD. Hurt was aware of Ross' standing in the MPD world, but she had no idea his work -- and the entire concept of MPD being more prevalent than previously believed -- was highly controversial in the mental-health field.

Born and educated in Canada, Ross set up an MPD practice in Winnipeg. Suddenly the number of MPD cases mushroomed and with it the number of women accusing their parents of having abused them decades earlier. In the 1980s, Ross sent research students into the community and concluded on the basis of two-hour interviews that one in 100 people in North America suffered MPD. But by the early 1990s, Ross told the Canadian Broadcast Company that the numbers were anywhere between 1 in 50 and 1 in 500.

At the time he was treating Hurt, he was facing two lawsuits accusing him of malpractice, according to his deposition in Hurt's case. In one, a government official whose wife and sister-in-law had been treated by one of Ross' acolytes claimed Ross had been indirectly responsible for his divorce and his sister-in-law's suicide. The suit against Ross was eventually dismissed. In the other suit, which is still pending, one of his Canadian patients claimed that her MPD was created in therapy and that Ross implanted false memories.

All Hurt knew about Ross was that he created the MPD unit at Charter and that everyone there looked up to him. Hurt complained to Ross about her discomfort with Ash casting out demons. Ross told her that the practice troubled him because other alters might fear the therapist was trying to kill them and they would retreat, which would hinder recovery. He talked to Ash about the problem and warned him only to persist if he was sure he was dealing with a demon and not just an alter that was masquerading as a demon, according to Ross' deposition.

Hurt still had problems with Ash's therapy. "That's when I fired Ash or, rather, Marty did," Hurt says. "Marty was a rebellious 13-year-old who didn't take crap off anybody. Now I wish he had come out more often."

Hurt began seeing Ross and counselor Mary Ellen Grundman. Hurt was having doubts about whether she was, in fact, a multiple. Ross assured her from looking at her record and talking with her that she did, in fact, suffer from MPD.

During her therapy with Ross, he did not try to destroy demon alters, but he called them forth and challenged them verbally. Grundman's therapy consisted of trying to get the alters to "shed their jobsuits" -- her own description of getting rid of their evil intent. For example, she told the alter Augustus, a cult high priestess, that there was not much future for women in the cult, according to Grundman's deposition.

If Hurt questioned the validity of her memories, Grundman told her she was in denial, according to the therapist's notes. At one point, Grundman wrote that a phone call from Hurt's sister sent her "back into denial." She also told Hurt that if she wouldn't do the work mapping alters, she would drop her as a patient.

Although Hurt was still suicidal at the end of her three-month hospitalization in March 1992, she was discharged. She was nervous about going home, and Grundman advised her to put her 4-year-old daughter, Jessica, into day care so she could focus on her therapy at home in between her three therapy sessions a week -- one with Ross and two with Grundman. Hurt complied, but throughout the spring and summer, she was barely able to function. "Between the meds and the memories, I was tranced-out all the time," she says.