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The Sussex Devils: A True Story of the 1980s Satanic Panic
'Heartbreaking and breathtaking.' – Clive Barker, author of Hellraiser
In 2012 Marc Heal stumbled across a yellowed newspaper cutting about Derry Knight: a man who claimed that he belonged to a secret Satanic group operating at the highest levels of British society. Helped by John Baker, vicar of the Sussex village of Newick, Knight had falsely raised large sums from wealthy gentry on the pretext of destroying powerful items of Satanic regalia.
Heal threw away the cutting but it made him deeply uneasy. Why could he remember nothing about the Knight affair even though he had grown up at its epicentre? Why did he know so much about the people in the story and yet recalled so little about it? Finally, he faced up to the reason for the blank: the trial had taken place in the weeks immediately after the defining trauma of his life. In December 1985 an elder from his parents' evangelical Christian church attempted an exorcism on him believing he was possessed by demons.
Based on extensive interviews with all the surviving witnesses this book explores the truth behind Derry Knight and the devastating effects that evangelical Christianity had on one young man.
In 2012 Marc Heal stumbled across a yellowed newspaper cutting about Derry Knight: a man who claimed that he belonged to a secret Satanic group operating at the highest levels of British society. Helped by John Baker, vicar of the Sussex village of Newick, Knight had falsely raised large sums from wealthy gentry on the pretext of destroying powerful items of Satanic regalia.
Heal threw away the cutting but it made him deeply uneasy. Why could he remember nothing about the Knight affair even though he had grown up at its epicentre? Why did he know so much about the people in the story and yet recalled so little about it? Finally, he faced up to the reason for the blank: the trial had taken place in the weeks immediately after the defining trauma of his life. In December 1985 an elder from his parents' evangelical Christian church attempted an exorcism on him believing he was possessed by demons.
Based on extensive interviews with all the surviving witnesses this book explores the truth behind Derry Knight and the devastating effects that evangelical Christianity had on one young man.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published October 29, 2015
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May 5, 2016
The 1980s was a time of evangelical revivalism in the south of England: the house church movement had blossomed into loose networks of congregations and parachurch events, while evangelical Anglican churches overflowed with worshippers from outside their parish boundaries. The general style of will be familiar to many: overhead projectors instead of hymn books; upbeat choruses; flutes and guitars; informal prayers that invariably began with “Lord, we just want to…”. In many cases, a sense of casual intimacy with God was also expressed through beliefs and practices associated with Pentecostalism, bringing a sense of miraculous possibilities into daily life.
However, the belief that God’s purposes and interventions are an ever-present reality has a flipside: if we are not guided and protected by God, we will instead be prey to malign spiritual entities: “the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Demonic forces may appear in many guises, but they are seen as being most obviously manifest in “the occult”: a broad designation for semi-secret or magical practices associated with esoteric groups such as Freemasonry and the Ordo Templis Orienti, or with paganism and witchcraft. In the judgment of evangelicals, all this kind of thing amounts to “Satanism”.
Marc Heal experienced this revival first-hand while growing up in the village of Danehill in Sussex. His adoptive parents were enthusiastic members of a church in Barcombe associated with the New Frontiers network, and he was also friendly with the son of the evangelical vicar of nearby Newick, Reverend John Baker. In 1986, Baker was pilloried in the press during a fraud trial in which it was revealed that he had been fundraising to help a self-described ex-Satanist supposedly extricate himself from occult bondage by purchasing and destroying Satanic regalia. The alleged ex-Satanist, Derry Mainwaring-Knight, had a long history of dishonesty and fraud (as well as sexual violence), and he was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Heal by this time was a young man living in London, and reading about the unfolding scandal in the press; however, he was also at the same time experiencing a deterioration in his mental health that was tipping over into psychosis. Following an outburst during a visit home, his parents arranged for him to have a traumatic – and counter-productive – exorcism. Heal is in places scathing of evangelical “lunacy”, but he doesn’t quite rationalize away his story, or that of Mainwaring-Knight. Mainwaring-Knight somehow persuaded many people who ought to have known better to part with their money, and during his trial it was stated that his grandmother had indeed been a witch, who had cursed him. Heal, meanwhile, had a success rate in his sales job that verged on the uncanny.
The Sussex Devils weaves the two stories together by means of a third strand. In 2012, again back in London, Heal finds himself thinking about the past and becoming increasingly obsessed with the question of what had happened to Mainwaring-Knight after his time in prison. The result is a multi-layered literary text: factual discussions of evangelical trends in Sussex and of occult groups; an imagined “docudrama” account of how Baker’s approach to Mainwaring-Knight came under critical scrutiny from the Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, leading eventually to the police being called in; Heal’s personal memoir, including details of horrifying hallucinations; and his attempt at closure by tracking Mainwaring-Knight down. It’s an odd but fascinating and informative synthesis.
[Minor spoiler follows]
In the last part of the book, Heal meets up with Baker’s widow to find that she remains a true believer in Mainwaring-Knight’s account of himself, and in the reality of Satanic conspiracies. He also corresponds with Mainwaring-Knight himself. Reflecting on “Satanic Panic” more generally, Heal writes:
The most notorious aspect of the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s and early 1990s was the claim that children were being sexually abused, and perhaps even murdered, by Satanic covens. In both the USA and the UK, the belief in Satanic Ritual Abuse led to disastrous interventions that saw innocent people accused, and families torn apart. In fact, a new "Satanic Panic" emerged while Heal was writing, in which a church in Hampstead was targeted for protests by an odd alliance of evangelicals and David Icke-style conspiracy theorists. However, more significant has been the recent "Operation Midland" police investigation into extravagant claims of "VIP" sex abuse and murder in the 1970s and 80s.
There is an overlap here with the Mainwaring-Knight affair: Heal notes that Mainwaring-Knight had named three politicians as Satanists during his trial: the then-Deputy Prime Minister, Willie Whitelaw, Enoch Powell, and Leo Abse. In a footnote, he adds that these names had re-emerged in press reports in March 2015; there are some dots that can be joined here.
The 2015 reports were prompted by renewed interest in a 1991 book by a journalist, Tim Tate, called Children for the Devil. The book included an interview with Dominic Walker, then a vicar in Sussex, who said that he had counselled several individuals who had claimed to have suffered Satanic Ritual Abuse at the hands of certain politicians. In late 2013, a former child protector officer named Peter McKelvie wrote to the Chair of the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Committee, Bishop Paul Butler, to demand that Walker give the names of these alleged abusers to the police. Walker did so in June 2014.
On 22 March 2015 the Sunday Times said that Walker had passed on an allegation that Abse had been part of a paedophile ring, along with “two Conservative cabinet ministers who have not been publicly linked to the scandal”. A week later, the Mail on Sunday reported that Walker had named Powell as a Satanic Ritual sex abuser, and the day after that The Times finally referenced Abse, Powell, and Whitelaw together.
So how did the press get hold of the fact that Walker had spoken to the police? The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is that the police asked Mainwaring-Knight about it, and he had then tipped off the Sunday Times himself. However, the allegation about Abse was used by the paper to beef up a story about a different investigation, into whether Abse and his friend George Thomas (Lord Tonypandy) had been involved a paedophile ring – this was why the whole outlandish “Satanic Ritual Abuse” provenance was initially obscured. Other papers then went further, but references to Mainwaring-Knight were studiously avoided. His name only at last appeared when the journalist David Aaronovitch published a sceptical commentary piece.
Heal notes that Mainwaring-Knight created a website soon after their correspondence; perhaps he was inspired to re-emerge from obscurity because of Heal’s interest, but it may not have been the only reason. As Heal concludes: “The magicians look set to prosper. We must, please, be vigilant.”
However, the belief that God’s purposes and interventions are an ever-present reality has a flipside: if we are not guided and protected by God, we will instead be prey to malign spiritual entities: “the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Demonic forces may appear in many guises, but they are seen as being most obviously manifest in “the occult”: a broad designation for semi-secret or magical practices associated with esoteric groups such as Freemasonry and the Ordo Templis Orienti, or with paganism and witchcraft. In the judgment of evangelicals, all this kind of thing amounts to “Satanism”.
Marc Heal experienced this revival first-hand while growing up in the village of Danehill in Sussex. His adoptive parents were enthusiastic members of a church in Barcombe associated with the New Frontiers network, and he was also friendly with the son of the evangelical vicar of nearby Newick, Reverend John Baker. In 1986, Baker was pilloried in the press during a fraud trial in which it was revealed that he had been fundraising to help a self-described ex-Satanist supposedly extricate himself from occult bondage by purchasing and destroying Satanic regalia. The alleged ex-Satanist, Derry Mainwaring-Knight, had a long history of dishonesty and fraud (as well as sexual violence), and he was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Heal by this time was a young man living in London, and reading about the unfolding scandal in the press; however, he was also at the same time experiencing a deterioration in his mental health that was tipping over into psychosis. Following an outburst during a visit home, his parents arranged for him to have a traumatic – and counter-productive – exorcism. Heal is in places scathing of evangelical “lunacy”, but he doesn’t quite rationalize away his story, or that of Mainwaring-Knight. Mainwaring-Knight somehow persuaded many people who ought to have known better to part with their money, and during his trial it was stated that his grandmother had indeed been a witch, who had cursed him. Heal, meanwhile, had a success rate in his sales job that verged on the uncanny.
The Sussex Devils weaves the two stories together by means of a third strand. In 2012, again back in London, Heal finds himself thinking about the past and becoming increasingly obsessed with the question of what had happened to Mainwaring-Knight after his time in prison. The result is a multi-layered literary text: factual discussions of evangelical trends in Sussex and of occult groups; an imagined “docudrama” account of how Baker’s approach to Mainwaring-Knight came under critical scrutiny from the Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, leading eventually to the police being called in; Heal’s personal memoir, including details of horrifying hallucinations; and his attempt at closure by tracking Mainwaring-Knight down. It’s an odd but fascinating and informative synthesis.
[Minor spoiler follows]
In the last part of the book, Heal meets up with Baker’s widow to find that she remains a true believer in Mainwaring-Knight’s account of himself, and in the reality of Satanic conspiracies. He also corresponds with Mainwaring-Knight himself. Reflecting on “Satanic Panic” more generally, Heal writes:
These days, most of the mainstream Christian churches play down the embarrassing excesses of the 1980s. It is tempting to look back on the satanic panic as an odd moment in history, a quaint, barbarous episode. In fact it is a mere foretaste of intensified moral panic in a culture that is losing its taste for reason and reverting to easier, primal urges… The powers of gut feeling and visual image are being promoted over the harder disciplines of logic and discourse.
The most notorious aspect of the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s and early 1990s was the claim that children were being sexually abused, and perhaps even murdered, by Satanic covens. In both the USA and the UK, the belief in Satanic Ritual Abuse led to disastrous interventions that saw innocent people accused, and families torn apart. In fact, a new "Satanic Panic" emerged while Heal was writing, in which a church in Hampstead was targeted for protests by an odd alliance of evangelicals and David Icke-style conspiracy theorists. However, more significant has been the recent "Operation Midland" police investigation into extravagant claims of "VIP" sex abuse and murder in the 1970s and 80s.
There is an overlap here with the Mainwaring-Knight affair: Heal notes that Mainwaring-Knight had named three politicians as Satanists during his trial: the then-Deputy Prime Minister, Willie Whitelaw, Enoch Powell, and Leo Abse. In a footnote, he adds that these names had re-emerged in press reports in March 2015; there are some dots that can be joined here.
The 2015 reports were prompted by renewed interest in a 1991 book by a journalist, Tim Tate, called Children for the Devil. The book included an interview with Dominic Walker, then a vicar in Sussex, who said that he had counselled several individuals who had claimed to have suffered Satanic Ritual Abuse at the hands of certain politicians. In late 2013, a former child protector officer named Peter McKelvie wrote to the Chair of the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Committee, Bishop Paul Butler, to demand that Walker give the names of these alleged abusers to the police. Walker did so in June 2014.
On 22 March 2015 the Sunday Times said that Walker had passed on an allegation that Abse had been part of a paedophile ring, along with “two Conservative cabinet ministers who have not been publicly linked to the scandal”. A week later, the Mail on Sunday reported that Walker had named Powell as a Satanic Ritual sex abuser, and the day after that The Times finally referenced Abse, Powell, and Whitelaw together.
So how did the press get hold of the fact that Walker had spoken to the police? The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is that the police asked Mainwaring-Knight about it, and he had then tipped off the Sunday Times himself. However, the allegation about Abse was used by the paper to beef up a story about a different investigation, into whether Abse and his friend George Thomas (Lord Tonypandy) had been involved a paedophile ring – this was why the whole outlandish “Satanic Ritual Abuse” provenance was initially obscured. Other papers then went further, but references to Mainwaring-Knight were studiously avoided. His name only at last appeared when the journalist David Aaronovitch published a sceptical commentary piece.
Heal notes that Mainwaring-Knight created a website soon after their correspondence; perhaps he was inspired to re-emerge from obscurity because of Heal’s interest, but it may not have been the only reason. As Heal concludes: “The magicians look set to prosper. We must, please, be vigilant.”
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