In a Wild West rerun of the Salem witch hunts, lots of folks here, including a grand jury, recently were convinced that some of their neighbors belonged to a murderous satanic cult.

"A mania went through this town," said Al McAllister, police chief in this hamlet of 4,822, a crossroads clearing in the towering pine forests of northeast Texas. "People started believing what they wanted to, not the evidence."

In January, a member of McAllister's force, Sgt. James Brown, was charged with murdering Kelly Wilson in a case he had investigated doggedly since the Gilmer teenager vanished without a trace two years earlier. It was alleged that Brown had participated in a conspiracy to abduct, rape, kill and ritually dismember the girl. His seven supposed partners in those crimes were members of the Kerr family and their friends, a clan of what is here called "country people," the local synonym for hillbillies.

Indeed, the Kerrs are marginal members of the community who live in tarpaper shacks and old trailers, content to eke out a living with food stamps and occasional odd jobs. Upon arrest, one of the Kerrs was given a form to fill out that included a question about annual income. "Don't know," she wrote. Asked her parents' address, another defendant wrote: "Don't know adress was raised children's home."

The Kerrs already had been charged with sexually abusing their own children, which predisposed some people to believe them capable of murdering Wilson.

"The Kerrs were the kind of people who make it easy to spread rumors about," said Richard Spruiell, a Baptist minister and the Police Department chaplain. This is Bible Belt country, Spruiell noted, and his congregants found it conceivable that others might secretly, even murderously, worship the devil.

But Sgt. Brown? That was harder to imagine of the 14-year police veteran. Spruiell said Brown is the kind of person who becomes a police officer because he has never lost his intense sense of right and wrong. McAllister said Brown would stay on even after his shift was done, clearing up the petty crimes, mostly burglaries and thefts, that are the usual entries on the police blotter here.

"James would go out looking for stolen goods," McAllister said, "and come back with so much it'd look like he'd been on safari."

Robbie and Waverlyn Wilson, Kelly's father and stepmother, said Brown was indefatigable in running down even the least likely tips to their daughter's disappearance. Brown put ads in the local paper and raised money for a highway billboard asking the public for clues. The Wilsons, who live across the state line in Louisiana, regularly joined Brown in tramping through the woods looking for places where a corpse might be hidden.

"We'd be bushed and tell James maybe it was time to put the case aside for for a while, to get some rest and a fresh perspective," Robbie Wilson said. "But he wouldn't. He looked for Kelly on his vacation time."

Still, after Brown was indicted by a grand jury in January, a lot of people-but not McAllister, Spruiell or the Wilsons-began thinking maybe he did have a darker side.

But even as they were adjusting to that idea, Texas' attorney general took the case over from local authorities. In March his representatives went into Circuit Judge F.L. "Tiny" Garrison's courtroom and had the murder charges against Brown and the Kerrs dismissed for lack of evidence.

Now people just don't know what to think, says Phillip Williams, who covers Gilmer for a nearby newspaper from a desk in the corner of his mother's furniture store, just across the street of the Upshur County Courthouse.

"Some folks say James Brown is as innocent as Snow White," Williams said. "Others think he's our Charles Manson."

The disappearance

All this began about 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 5, 1992, when Kelly Wilson, 17, left the video store where she worked and headed for a nearby bank with the day's receipts, which were later found in the night depository. The next morning, Wilson's car was discovered parked alongside the video store by her mother, Cathy Carlson, who reported to the police that her daughter hadn't come home.

Sources said Brown pursued several hypotheses in his investigation. (Brown and other former defendants in the murder case remain under a court order not to discuss it.) Kelly Wilson's parents are divorced and, according to Joe Henry, Kelly's boss, she was conflicted about which household to live in. Henry says Brown toyed with the idea that Kelly might have run away because of family pressures.

Also, it was generally known that there was bad blood between Kelly's current and previous boyfriends, while other young people who claimed no knowledge of her whereabouts seemed not to be telling the truth.

"It was hard to find anyone who could pass a polygraph test," said McAllister.

But no hard evidence was discovered. So Kelly Wilson's disappearance might have become just another unsolved missing-person case when it unexpectedly dovetailed with the Kerr family's problems.

According to Cloy Kerr, those began in 1990 when one of his brothers, Wendell, told his wife, Loretta, he wanted a divorce. Loretta suspected she was being set aside for a younger woman and accused Wendell of abusing their children. He eventually was convicted of child molestation and put on probation.

Ann Goar, a state child-welfare worker assigned to the case, later concluded that other members of the Kerr clan were sexually abusing their children. Over the next several years, more than a dozen children were taken into protective custody by Goar and Debbie Minshew, another worker with the state Child Protective Services.

According to court documents, Goar and Minshew also concluded that the Kerrs' wasn't just a case of child abuse but involved satanic practices as well. Goar said in an affidavit that in October 1992 two of the children "took Debbie Minshew and me to show us where the devil people meet to sexually abuse and kill the babies."

Overstepping bounds?

Goar and Minshew brought their findings to Tim Cone, the local district attorney, who said he couldn't handle the case because of a conflict of interest: He had previously represented some of the potential defendants.

At the social workers' suggestion, Cone said in an interview, he recommened that Scott Lyford, a Galveston lawyer, be named special prosecutor, an arrangement accepted by Judge Garrison. Cone and Garrison both said that Lyford was previously unknown to them, but that the social workers assured them he was experienced in handling cases involving satanic cults.