II.

Claudia Bryden, now 60, landed in Martensville as a first class constable in the fall of 1991.

An RCMP officer who had started out in a small detachment in Manitoba, Bryden had left the force after seven months when her husband, also a police officer, was relocated to Saskatoon. She was at home, caring for their two young children, when she was asked to step in and help the town's struggling, modestly staffed police force.

Complaints about files being mishandled or misplaced, along with generally shoddy police work, had landed both the Martensville police chief and one of its officers off on suspension. Another was off with an injury.

It was meant to be temporary; only about four to six weeks, Bryden said.

In the dying days of September, a Martensville mother, a nurse, notices some redness and broken skin on her young daughter’s bottom. She believed it to be a bit more than an angry diaper rash.

When she asks the 2½-year-old about it, the girl replies a stranger had been "poking her" with a pink rope. The stranger, the young girl later says, lives at Linda’s.

She was referring to the home of Linda Sterling, where she attends daycare.

Linda Sterling and her husband, Ron, were mainstays in the community; Linda had tended to many children in Martensville for years, and Ron was a volunteer firefighter and assistant deputy director of a correctional centre not far out of town, friends with many of the town’s cops.

Over the weekend, the parents ask their daughter more questions and the girl provides more details. By Monday, a call is made to the Martensville police.

The parents take the child to a doctor, who sees no signs of abuse. But the parents remain convinced, going so far as to suggest that they believed the girl was sexually assaulted by the Sterlings' adult son, Travis.





Listen to Episode 2 of Uncover: Satanic Panic

Bryden is handed the file on Oct. 1.



At first, it seemed like a straightforward case, Bryden said.

"I tell people, 'It's a good thing I didn't know what was coming, because I would have run.' I would have been gone if I knew what was coming down the pipe," she said in an interview with CBC’s Uncover.

One day into her investigation, the station's secretary gives Bryden an index card from a filing system for old cases: It outlines another allegation of sexual assault made against Travis.

A nine-year-old girl had reported being groped, repeatedly, while at the Sterling daycare.

Charges had not been laid.

Bryden goes looking for the case file — dating back to 1988 — and finds a single, crumpled up piece of paper, shoved in the back of a filing cabinet. According to Bryden, "not even the most basic" of police work had been done. Two days later, Travis Sterling is arrested and charged with one count of sexual assault over that old complaint.

What started with just one accusation from one family in Martensville, Sask., soon ballooned into many more (Maria Nguyen/CBC)

What started with just one accusation from one family in Martensville, Sask., soon ballooned into many more (Maria Nguyen/CBC)

But Bryden's bigger concern was the daycare.

"The very next priority, of course, was to identify as best as possible other potential victims. It was a problem to have this daycare operating while we were actively investigating these types of complaints," she said. "We had a duty to protect the public."

Bryden begins contacting as many families as she can. Rod Moor, a corporal from the nearby Saskatoon Police Service, is brought in to help. It was the two officers' job to interview the children, a process that played out over the next few months.

"I still have scars on the inside of my cheeks. I would swallow my own blood in the middle of interviewing children, because I did not want to show that this was difficult for me to get through as well," said Bryden.

At first, the children had nothing to say; nothing bad had happened. But as the questioning continued, a pattern began to emerge. One boy said he was forced to perform a sexual act at gunpoint. Another said he was asked to take off his clothes and was photographed.

Then the children’s recountings took a hard turn into something darker: Talk of a blue "Devil Church" outside of town where they were taken; some said they were forced to drink blood and injected with drugs. Or they were tortured and made to perform sex acts — on adults and on each other.

Then, the children said, some of the people involved wore uniforms. Police uniforms.

In just a few weeks, the size of the case file became unmanageable, spiralling into not only charges against all three Sterlings, but also an investigation into many other suspects.

Randy Chudyk moved to Martensville in the late 1980s, and became one of the town's police officers. It was somewhere he could see himself spending his whole career, he said.



"Honestly, it was just ... such a perfect place. Close to a big city, but you didn't have all those big city problems. People were really, really nice and welcomed me and my family."

Things changed, however, as the abuse allegations began to fly.

"Once people caught wind of this investigation and everything else like that, they looked at the police department completely different," he said.

"You try and go about and do your job to the best of your ability, but you look at everybody differently. You look at everybody going, ‘Are they involved?’ And it not only became very hard to work ... but it was also very hard to [try] to do your job in the community."

The panic that played out during the Martensville Nightmare in the early 1990s tore the town apart, with neighbours, colleagues and even family members suspecting each other. (Maria Nguyen/CBC)

The panic that played out during the Martensville Nightmare in the early 1990s tore the town apart, with neighbours, colleagues and even family members suspecting each other. (Maria Nguyen/CBC)

By early 1992, the investigation is wending its way along, and the children involved are in regular counselling. Bryden gets a call from one of the counsellors, asking if she’s heard of ritual abuse.

Around the same time, a new police chief arrives, Mike Johnston. Under his leadership, the investigation starts to focus on apparent satanic connections.

And as the spring thaw began, another stunning turn. Acting on a tip from a local pastor, an urgent memo goes out, warning the Martensville Municipal Police Service of a planned invasion. Officers are put on high alert and told to brace for chaos.

"The indications were that tonight was a very important night with the Occult in the preparation of potential victims," reads a report dated April 16, 1992. "The group in town is known as the Brotherhood of the Ram, with the Ram being a reference to Satan."

The memo warns officers that the group can — and does — offer human sacrifices. Churches would be targeted and buildings burned. Children would be stolen.

Chudyk remembers the heightened sense of panic in the station after being told the town was going to be "attacked."

"Going through everything that happened and then getting this … it just shakes your foundation and sends shivers down your back," he said.

But nobody ever showed up. And after about five days, Chudyk said, things largely went back to normal.

Investigators, though, were still pushing forward with abuse charges.