The Presidio Satanic Ritual Abuse Case

17 min readOct 29, 2024

Warning: Graphic sexual-assault language

In the late 1980’s an Army review team looked into 300 Army child care centers for allegations of sexual abuse. They found that in those years, allegations had been made in 30 of them, including the US Army post where the infamous “Presidio case” took place. [1]

Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) allegations at the Presidio of San Francisco surfaced in 1986, after medical examination confirmed the rape of a 3 year old boy, who accused a teacher he referred to as “Mr. Gary”. However the case took a bizarre turn after other children also pointed the finger at “The Colonel”, an influential officer and Satanist who was part of the Army’s Psychological Operations (PsyOp). [1][2][3]

Nearly 100 children were examined for psychological and physical evidence of sexual abuse, with 58 identified as molestation victims and at least 4 being found infected with chlamydia.[1][7]

During the investigation, the Army Community Service’s building, which happened to be right next to the day care, caught on fire. The building was destroyed along with records from the Child Development Center. Then 3 weeks later another fire struck, but this time the day care center itself and four classrooms including Mr. Gary’s. [3][10]

The Army claimed the fires to be accidental. But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) found that “both fires, contrary to the Army’s finding, had been arson”. Evidence of a failed 3rd arson attempt was also discovered. [3][10]

Interesting to note is that the first fire occurred during the Autumnal Equinox — a Satanic holiday. [3][10]

Army of the Night

The San Francisco Mercury News reported:

“Inside a concrete bunker behind the Military Intelligence Building at the Presidio, the words “Prince of Darkness” are painted boldly in red on one wall. Used decades ago to house artillery guns, the reinforced concrete batteries appear to have been converted to something like ritual chambers.

Emblazoned next to the “Prince of Darkness” is the word “Die,” and what looks like a list of names, painted in red, that have been crossed out with heavy black paint. One wall is covered with the numerals 666, a sign of the devil, and occult drawings. A clearing in the center of the concrete floor, where the ground is exposed, is filled with refuse and partly burned logs. On the front wall beneath the window that faces the Military Intelligence Building is a huge pentagram inside a circle. In the rear, where sunlight gives way to darkness, white and black candle drippings sit atop a dome shaped recession in the wall, apparently a crude altar. Incense sticks lie half burned to the side.

At another battery farther up Lincoln Boulevard, a large drawing of Satan, with red eyes and horns appears on an outside concrete wall. Doors to the battery are secured shut; there are no windows to climb though. No entry is possible here.” [10]

Reports on strange activity in Presidio seem to have been around a few years before the case. An MP recalls “We got a call from the Portola MacArthur housing area. One person reported a man dressed in black holding a little girl’s hand running toward the park. Another call came in saying they heard screams near the creek”. [10]

“The search led to a gardener’s shack at Julius Kahn Park, a strip of city-owned playground adjacent to the Presidio, behind the housing area. “We heard noises coming from inside,” Albanoski recalls. “We kicked the door open and here’s this nice little bedroom. In a corner was a mannequin with a gun aimed at the door. On the left side there was a bunk against the wall. There was a pentagram on the floor, a huge one. There were dolls’ heads all over the ceiling, just off-the-wall stuff.” Music was blaring from a radio.

Albanoski and another MP were given approval to set up surveillance of the shack. After a while, the investigation was called off. “We were sitting there, we’ve got a cult on the Presidio of San Francisco and nobody cares about it,” Albanoski says. “We were told by the provost marshall to just forget about it”. Though Albanoski’s investigation went nowhere, the child abuse cases would raise the specter of satanism again.” [10]

The High Priest

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino, High Priest of the Temple of Set

“The Colonel” was the controversial Michael Aquino, an Army Lieutenant Colonel who specialized in Psychological Warfare. Aquino was once a high ranking member of the Church of Satan, and left to create the Temple of Set after expressing ideological disagreements with the former. [3][4]

Aquino has been named in various child sexual abuse cases such as the Johnny Gotch case, Franklin Scandal, and other military day care ritual abuse cases around the country. [3][14]

“It was at their home that the 3-year-old daughter of the Presidio’s former assistant chaplain said the Aquinos abused her in a room with black walls and a cross on the ceiling”. “The girl referred to them as “Mikey” and “Shamby” “ [Aquino’s wife]. The victim was the daughter of Army Captain Larry Adam-Thompson. According to the girl’s testimony, after being abused by “Mr. Gary”, she was then taken to Aquino’s apartment where she was abused and filmed in a bathtub decorated with lion’s feet. [5][6][7]

“The records also say the child accurately described some features of Aquino’s home, including walls painted black, and was able to take investigators to the home after being driven to the street where Aquino lived.” [5]

She was also able to identify both “Mr. Gary” and the Aquinos. [7]

During the raid at the apartment on 2420 Leavenworth St, they seized “36 videotapes, photographic negatives, photo albums, cassette tapes and photos of costumes, masks and stars”. However there was never a public statement on what these items contained. [6]

Aquino said that him and his wife Lilith, left San Francisco in July 1986, two months before the allegations took place. But refused to publicly say the amount of times he went back since leaving to attend a one-year course at the National Defense University in Washington DC — putting his alibi into question. Documentation of the Army’s investigation show that he admitted returning to San Francisco on September ’86, and December ’86 to January ’87. He claims he was not at his residence, but phone records show calls were made from there during those dates (including August ‘86), that he could not account for. Interestingly the document mentions that Aquino injected an unidentified individual with a “undetermined substance” during his return in September ’86. [7][8]

It’s worth noting that Aquino said that during his time in DC, he was “holding a top-secret compartmentalized security clearance, which is just about as high as you can get”. [7]

Official documents related to the investigation reveal several things, such as the “lion tub” not being found, but that it might have been removed; the black walls belonging to the master bedroom and not the living room as the girl describes; no painted cross on the ceiling; and the floors being made of hardwood, not covered by rugs. [8]

However Aquino admitted to owning two buildings in the location, totaling in 4 apartments, with only the top flat being searched on August 1987. Aquino’s brother-in-law lived in one of the apartments that was not searched. [8]

The apartment that was raided was being re-painted during the date of the accusations, between June 1986 and January 1987. An individual who visited Aquino in April or May of ’86 says the front room had dark walls at the time. Also another person who installed a security system at Aquino’s, says the place had various “dark rooms”, and “a padded room on the upper level”. [8]

The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department contacted the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), regarding a victim in another ritual abuse case had identified Aquino. However they had a different prime suspect, a US Navy member who lived nearby. [8]

A probation officer from Verdemont Boys Ranch in San Bernardino contacted investigators about a probationer claiming his brother was part of the Temple of Set in Lake Arrowhead CA. And that suspects in a rape trial there were probably connected to the Temple, but the individual did not contribute further information. [8]

Investigators attempted to trace communications between Aquino and the suspects from the other two cases, but the documents redact the results. The files mention that toll records between the Navy man and Aquino would not be found due to the short living distance between them. [8]

After all of that, prosecutors decided not to charge Aquino and closed the investigation into him, because “there was insufficient evidence to prove it . . . beyond a reasonable doubt”, according to Deputy District Attorney Michael Williams. [9]

Aquino wrote his defense on the book Extreme Prejudice. He died in 9/01/19, by suicide through a “contact gunshot wound of head”, as per his death certificate. [15]

Mr. Gary

The original allegations were made by 3 year old boy Joyce Tobin against Gary Hambright, a Baptist Minister and day care teacher:

“Trying to keep her voice calm, Joyce asked her son what he was talking about.

The child’s reply was terse and grim. “He touched my penis with his hand, and he bit my penis.” The boy made a chomping sound with his mouth. Asked if “Mr. Gary” had done anything else, the boy said, “He put a pencil in my hole in my bottom. He do that, he do that to me. He hurt me and I cry and I cry.”” [10]

Baptist Minister and teacher Gary Hambright

Soon after the CID recorded the child’s testimony and he was examined by the Child Adolescent Sexual Abuse Referral Center (CASARC), who confirmed anal trauma. After being notified, it took 12 days for the Army to form a strategy group, and nearly a month for them to notify other parents with children in Hambright’s class. A year later, more than 60 victims between the ages of 3–7 were identified, and the day care remained open until then. [10]

The Tobins had to force the Army to send out a letter to other parents, because according to a CASARC worker, they “didn’t want to believe” the allegations. This is nonsensical as the same daycare had been investigated, but cleared, years before for sexual abuse. [10]

The San Francisco Mercury News reported: [10]

“*Some of the children said they were taken from the day care center to private homes on the Presidio where they were sexually abused. Two houses were singled out on the Army post and at least one home off-post, in San Francisco.

*One girl said she played “poopoo baseball” at the home of one of her female teachers. The girl said the game involved throwing feces at the teacher.

*Other children talked about playing the “googoo game” with “Mr. Gary”. It involved Hambright having the children urinate and defecate on him. Then he would do the same to them. Sometimes, the children said, they were forced to drink urine and eat feces. Some said they had blood smeared on their bodies.

*Some children said they had guns pointed at them. Others said they were told they or their parents would be killed if they told what happened.

*One 3-year-old boy said he was sexually abused on his first visit to the center. That day was also his birthday.

*A 3-year-old girl said “Mr. Gary” used special pens, black, blue, pink and red — to doodle on her, starting at her legs and moving up over her genitals. The same child said she saw one of her friends at the center cry when “Mr. Gary’s” friend, a woman, pointed a gun at the friend.

*There were five confirmed cases of chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease, including two of the four daughters of one family.

*A preliminary test of one boy for AIDS came back positive. Further tests revealed that he did not have the disease, but fear of AIDS tormented parents for months.” [10]

There were also accusations of forced sex with animals, and blood play. While some of the stories sound way over the top, such as the ritualistic use of excrement and urine, be aware that similar accusations were also made by other children in separate military day care centers. This was not an isolated incident. And they also appear in various major pedo cases such as the Dutroux Affair in Belgium (Gladio pedo ring). [10][11][17][18]

In the Presidio case, one alternate theory could be that abusive parents of over 60 children, framed the day care to cover up their own crimes. But was this really coordinated by so many parents scattered throughout 30 bases around the country?

Unlike Aquino, Hambright was arrested in January 1987, but only for abusing one child. 3 months later the charges were dropped, because US District Court Judge William Schwarzer did not allow the admission of “hearsay statements”. It turns out Federal courts and California state courts have hearsay rules for children and can refuse admission. But the case was allowed to be reopened if new evidence emerged. [10]

Army Meddling

The Army’s own investigation was shady from the start. Army criminal investigator Marc Remson was assigned to interview the Tobin child, and appeared to be coaching him on how to tell his story. The tape was quickly used to claim the child was being prodded to make false accusations. [10]

But many other children were making similar accusations against Hambright, and other day care workers. All while Lt. Col. Walter Meyer called the place “a model day care center”, ignoring the fact that the place had been under investigation for child sexual and physical abuse a few years before (John Gunnarson 1981 allegations). According to the day care worker Pearl Broadnax who reported sexual abuse in 1981, “nobody seemed to be concerned” about the ongoing abuse there. [10]

After the aforementioned second fire that destroyed Gary Hambright’s classroom, he was re-indicted on molestation charges involving 10 children. The charges were grossly toned down, with 10 being for lewd and lascivious acts, and 2 for oral copulation. This meant he was no longer accused of raping the Tobin kid and others. [10]

Hambright’s statement? “I cannot understand why these allegations and falsehoods have been, directed solely at me”. However his lawyer claims Hambright wasn’t referring to anyone else — despite the many accusations against multiple individuals. [10]

The Chlamydia samples were also non-admissible because the Letterman Army Medical Center conveniently used the wrong kind of culture in their testing. Parents were refused from going back and getting more samples taken. [10]

In a case that looks like it’s being rigged from the start, 10 out of 60 kids were chosen by the Assistant US Attorney Susan Gray because they would apparently make “the best witnesses”. Conveniently missing were the children infected with STDs. Slowly Gray and Judge Schwarzer began to dismiss the testimony of each of the kids “because the charges were too vague”. In other words the kids were handpicked because the officials knew their testimony would not back the “vague charges” that were put in place with the likely goal of dismissing the charges. [10]

The final kid Joyce Tobin was removed because a therapist advised his parents that continuing the case could do him psychological harm. [10][12]

Hambright was saved once more from prison, but years later he died of AIDS. [10]

The US Attorney’s Office admitted to putting limitations on how they would prosecute the case: “our decision was that we could only prosecute for acts that occurred at the Presidio”, which prevented cases in which Hambright took children outside the Presidio boundaries from being prosecuted. Why would they do that? [10]

Another ridiculous excuse was that the police put so much effort into investigating Aquino, that the other 60 victim’s allegations could not be investigated fully. [10]

The Army decided to reassigned controversial individuals involved in the day care, such as director Lt. Col. Walter Meyer, and day care supervisor John Gunnarson, who had been accused of physical and sexual abuse years before. Another Director, Diana Curl, resigned. [10]

Russoniello, Iran/Contra, and Jonestown Links

Announcing the charges against Gary Hambright was US Attorney Joseph Russoniello. He was the man that decided not to charge Michael Aquino, Gary Hambright, and avoided going after other suspects. [10][12]

Journalist Nick Bryant (Franklin Scandal, Jeffrey Epstein case fame) says that Russoniello had a history of protecting government connected criminals: [13]

“In 1983, federal agents seized 430 pounds of cocaine as divers attempted to unload it from a Colombian freighter at San Francisco’s Pier 96. The value of the drugs was estimated at $100 million, and officials called it the biggest coke bust in West Coast history. The San Francisco Examiner later reported that the government seized $36,020 in cash from the home of smuggler’s ringleader, but returned the cash to the ringleader after he presented letters from Contra leaders who said the money was earmarked for the “reinstatement of democracy in Nicaragua.”

The ringleader’s attorneys had asked the court for funds to travel to Costa Rica to take depositions from the two Contra leaders providing the letters, and U.S. Attorney Russoniello said the money was returned because it would have cost the government just as much to go to Costa Rica and fight over “nickels and dimes.” Russoniello’s decision was very bizarre, because once the government seizes the funds of drug dealers it almost never returns them.

An additional controversy spearheaded by the office of U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California under Russoniello was the prosecution of Laurence Layton. Layton had been a member of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, and he was charged with conspiring in the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan — Layton was the only person brought up on charges pertaining to the murder.

Layton’s attorneys sought access to CIA files, because they argued that the documents might support their contention that the CIA was partly to blame for the killing of Congressman Ryan and four others on a Guyana airstrip, and the mass murder-suicide that followed at Jonestown. Assistant U.S. Attorneys for the Northern District of California and the CIA’s attorneys vehemently argued against release of the documentation and their arguments were supported by the judge. So the government escaped coughing up files that would have potentially connected the CIA and Jonestown. […]

Interestingly, in 1996, Robert T. Crowley who served the CIA from 1948 through the mid-1980s, as the Assistant Deputy Director for Operations and also as the number two man in the clandestine Directorate of Operations, reportedly gave selected journalists access to some of his extensive personal files. Crowley’s files covered many subjects, including an alphabetic listing of the names of 2,619 CIA sources throughout the world. One of the names on Crowley’s list just happened to be Joseph P. Russoniello of San Francisco.” [13]

Was The Evidence Sufficient?

In 1992, Dr. Diane Ehrensaft published a paper on the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry titled “Preschool Child Sex Abuse: The Aftermath of the Presidio Case”. The article lists most of the already listed stories told by children, and the results of evaluations made by medical examiners. To make it short, the psychological and physical sexual abuse trauma was confirmed, as well as the various sexually transmitted infections. Keep in mind that most of the children who were examined were not called in to testify by the US District Attorneys. If you want to read the paper, go to the following citation. [16]

Harassment and Threats Against Witnesses

Lawyer Cynthia Angell was originally hired in a custody case for the father of one of the child victims from the day care: [17][18]

“The case was due to go to start on 1 February 1989. The night before that first hearing I got a telephone call from a woman who was going to be a key witness. She asked me to meet her at a restaurant on the main street here in Red Bluff because she had some important information for me. I agreed, got in my car and drove downtown.

When I got to the restaurant she wasn’t there, but before I could even get out of the car two men got in through the passenger side. One pointed a gun at my head and told me to drive out of town. I was made to drive about four miles out of town and at that point I was blindfolded and put into a second car and driven somewhere else. During the course of this kidnapping — which lasted about three hours in total — I was told that I was investigating things that I shouldn’t be investigating and that if I continued with it I would be killed. “

The kidnapping and threats were reported to police: [14][19]

“A reward of $10,000 is offered for the arrest and conviction of a man who allegedly abducted a Red Bluff attorney at gunpoint in a child custody case that may be linked to Satanism and ritualistic abuse.

“That’s the only motive we can see,” Red Bluff police Detective Ted Wiley said today of the Feb. 2 kidnapping of Cynthia Angell, 32. “

“The man allegedly threatened Ms. Angell’s life several times if she continued to investigate links between a Tehama County child custody case and a San Francisco Bay Area children’s day school.

The man told Ms. Angell that she was investigating something that she shouldn’t and showed her a photograph of a baby whose skin had been partially removed, Wiley said.

“It looked like it could have been an autopsy photo, but the man said it was a child who had been killed during a satanic ritual,” Ms. Angell told police.”

“However, Wiley said a composite drawing and description of the man who allegedly kidnapped Ms. Angell resembles a man reportedly involved in a case in which a child or doll was seen hanging from a signpost on Kirkwood Road near Corning on July 29, 1987.

In that case, a man who identified himself as a police officer told a concerned citizen that everything was under control while another man and woman removed the child or doll from the signpost.

Police artist Marjorie Casebeer initially noticed similarities between suspects in the two cases as she was drawing the man Ms. Angell described.

Tehama County sheriff’s Capt. Allen Groves said today there are some dissimilarities between the two composite drawings, but would not rule out that the two suspects could be the same man.”

Angell’s client was the father of a child victim who went to the day care. After the child made accusations of ritual abuse, the mother used them to claim the father was responsible for it. This got Angell involved with the Presidio case. Eventually Angell’s client won custody in court but it made her the target of numerous death threats. In 2001, a little over a decade later, her house was set on fire 2 times in July; her dog was found dead, and car vandalized. [20][21]

Michelle Adams-Thompson, wife of Captain Larry Adams-Thompson suffered an assassination attempt when the case on Michael Aquino was reopened: