CHAPTER SEVEN: UNDERGROUND
Tunnels, Networks, and the Unseen Architecture
"What is hidden in darkness will be brought to light."
Editor's note: This chapter addresses claims about underground spaces used to conceal abuse. Every case cited below is either court-documented or drawn from verified news reporting. Where claims remain contested or legally unresolved, this is stated plainly. The chapter does not assert that a coordinated national tunnel network for child abuse exists — that claim is not supported by evidence — but it does document real cases in which abusers used hidden or underground spaces to conceal crimes.
Hidden Spaces, Hidden Crimes
One of the most disorienting aspects of organized abuse is the use of concealed locations to carry out crimes away from witnesses. Subterranean and hidden spaces — constructed tunnels, natural caves, buried chambers — can provide abusers with physical isolation and a sense of control over victims. The cases below represent documented instances in which underground or hidden spaces played a role in child abuse, presented with their legal status and evidentiary basis.
Case Study: Deming, New Mexico — Underground Dwellings Used to Isolate Children (2024–2025)
Source: KRQE News 13, Albuquerque; KOAT 7, May 2025.
New Mexico State Police arrested Melvin Cordell (50) and Valerie Cordell (41) in February 2025 following an investigation into allegations of severe child abuse involving eight children on their 35-acre property in Deming, Luna County, New Mexico.
Investigation was triggered in October 2024 when a 16-year-old daughter, while enrolled at the New Mexico National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Academy in Roswell, disclosed the abuse to academy staff. The academy notified the Roswell Police Department, which referred the case to the New Mexico State Police.
Investigators found the eight children — ranging in age from six months to sixteen years — had been forced to live in hand-dug mud caves approximately four to six feet deep on a property described in court documents as resembling a trash landfill. Mattresses and buckets of feces were found in the caves. Court filings allege the abuse spanned roughly a decade (approximately 2014–2024). Additional allegations in court filings include sexual assault of minors; these remain allegations — both defendants have entered not-guilty pleas and are held without bond at the Luna County Detention Center pending trial.
All eight children are now in the custody of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD).
Charges filed:
- Melvin Cordell: 16 counts of child abuse, 2 counts of criminal sexual penetration, 1 count of criminal sexual contact of a minor, 1 count of conspiracy to commit child abuse.
- Valerie Cordell: 16 counts of child abuse, 1 count of conspiracy to commit child abuse.
Significance: This case demonstrates how crude earthen structures can be used to isolate and control children on private rural property, evading routine welfare checks. Systemic failures identified include prior CYFD visits that did not remove the children.
PDPC Policy Recommendations:
- Rural-property monitoring: State and county agencies should inspect excavated or earthen structures used as dwellings.
- Mandatory welfare checks where multiple minors are present on isolated acreage and schooling or medical records are irregular.
- Inter-agency alert systems linking youth academies, school counselors, and child-services caseworkers when students report extreme living conditions.
Case: Kansas City, Missouri — Children Found in Underground Cave (2015)
Sources: Portland Press Herald, Fox News, Washington Post, September 2015.
Jackson County Sheriff's deputies serving a search warrant on an alleged stolen-car operation discovered two young boys — ages four and six — living in a wooden crate inside a commercial cave complex on the eastern edge of Kansas City. The children were barefoot, malnourished, and found with minimal food. Their mother, Brittany Mugrauer (24), was located separately and charged with two felony counts of child endangerment.
This case was not organized abuse; the mother's action appears to have been neglect connected to her circumstances rather than deliberate concealment for purposes of exploitation. It is included here because it illustrates how commercial underground spaces — Kansas City's cave network has been repurposed for decades as legitimate business storage — are physically concealing by design and can harbor child welfare crises invisible to normal observation. The boys were only found because law enforcement was executing a warrant for an unrelated investigation.
Legal outcome: Mugrauer was charged with felony child endangerment. No organized trafficking charges were filed.
Case Note: McMartin Preschool, Manhattan Beach, California (1980s–1990s)
This case is presented as contested, not settled. It is included because it is frequently cited in survivor advocacy contexts and the factual status of the tunnel claim is often misrepresented.
The McMartin Preschool case (1984–1990) was the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history to that point. No convictions were obtained. In 1990, after the criminal proceedings ended, parents privately funded an archaeological excavation of the razed preschool site led by archaeologist E. Gary Stickel (PhD, UCLA-affiliated), who concluded in a 1993 report that two tunnel-like structures existed beneath the building.
The contested finding: An earlier excavation by the District Attorney's office found no evidence of tunnels. Independent reviewers of Stickel's 1993 report concluded the features were more consistent with pre-existing trash pits from the period before the school was built. Ted Gunderson, who helped organize the dig, was not a neutral investigator — he was a privately hired advocate who was also a prominent figure in Satanic Panic-era conspiracy advocacy; his credibility on this finding is disputed.
Status: CONTESTED. There is no scientific consensus that abuse-related tunnels existed under McMartin. Children's accounts emerged under now-discredited interviewing techniques. Citing the McMartin tunnels as established fact would be inaccurate.
What is accurate: The case involved real children making real disclosures that were badly mishandled by investigators, prosecutors, and the media. The failure of prosecution does not mean abuse did not occur; it means it was not proven in court. Many children and families experienced lasting harm from the investigation process itself.
Documented Conviction: Glasgow, Scotland (2023–2025)
Sources: Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) press release; ITV News; LBC; January 2025.
In November 2023, seven people were convicted at the High Court in Glasgow following an eight-week trial for child sexual abuse and related offenses committed between 2012 and 2019. The group, described by the court as a ring, subjected children to severe abuse in a drug-den setting. Evidence presented at trial included:
- Children being chased by adults wearing devil masks
- A child being forced into a microwave, fridge freezer, oven, and other confined spaces (attempted murder conviction returned)
- Participants using Ouija boards and conducting "seances" invoking spirits
- Animals killed in front of children; children forced to participate in harming animals
In January 2025, all seven were sentenced to terms of eight to twenty years with mandatory lifetime monitoring. The presiding judge stated the case "plunges to the depths of human depravity."
Significance: This is a recent, fully documented conviction involving ritualistic elements used to terrorize child victims. It demonstrates that abuse incorporating occult staging and symbolic cruelty is real, prosecutable, and has resulted in serious sentences.
Research Context: Organized Ritual Abuse — Documented Cases and Policy Response
In July 2025, the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC) and the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) published a research review by clinical psychologist Dr. Elly Hanson titled Organised Ritual Abuse and Its Wider Context: Degradation, Deception and Disavowal. The report identified fourteen UK criminal cases since 1982 in which ritualistic practices in child sexual abuse were formally acknowledged by courts, nine of which involved multiple perpetrators. The report is accompanied by operational guidance for police investigators.
NAPAC also notes that its helplines receive many reports of ritual abuse that never reach police — a pattern the report attributes to barriers including societal disbelief and fear of not being taken seriously.
What this research does and does not establish: The report confirms that ritualistic elements in organized child sexual abuse are real and have been prosecuted. It does not confirm the existence of large coordinated national or international trafficking networks with underground installations. The cases documented are real criminal prosecutions, not conspiracy claims.
Legislative Note: Utah HB 196 (2024)
Utah House Bill 196, sponsored by Rep. Ken Ivory (R-West Jordan) and supported by Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith, proposed creating a distinct felony offense for ritualistic child sexual abuse, defining it as abuse occurring as part of an event designed to "commemorate, celebrate, or solemnize a particular occasion" in a religious, social, institutional, or other context. Specific acts listed included animal torture, cannibalism, forcing a child into a coffin, and drugging as part of the ritual.
The bill passed the House Judiciary Committee in February 2024 but was never brought to a floor vote and died when the 2024 legislative session ended. Lawmakers voted in an interim committee in September 2024 to attempt to revive the bill; as of mid-2025 it had not become law.
Critics noted that the bill's language echoed 1980s-era ritual abuse statutes, most of which were repealed or fell into disuse after FBI behavioral science reviews and investigative journalism found no evidence of coordinated satanic networks behind the cases that prompted them. Due process concerns center on the difficulty of distinguishing religious practice from criminalized "ritual."
The Utah County ritual abuse investigation (2022–2025) that prompted legislative attention resulted in charges against therapist David Hamblin, which were dismissed with prejudice in March 2025. The presiding judge cited "the quantity and quality of prosecutorial missteps." Defense attorneys publicly accused the Sheriff's Office of misleading the public about the case.
Survivor Experience: Ritual Abuse — What the Evidence Shows
Ritual abuse refers to systematic physical, sexual, and psychological abuse inflicted in a ceremonial context — using occult symbols, staged ceremonies, animal harm, or scripted cruelty to terrorize victims and reinforce secrecy. The Glasgow case above is one of fourteen documented UK convictions. Courts have acknowledged such abuse as real.
Survivors of ritual abuse consistently describe:
- Being forced to participate in ceremonies designed to terrify and degrade
- Sexual violence staged in ritual contexts
- Drugging, dissociation, and deliberate psychological fragmentation
- Fear of disclosure because of the perceived impossibility of being believed
Clinical psychologist Dr. Elly Hanson's 2025 research confirms that extreme psychological harm — including severe PTSD and dissociative disorders — is well-documented in survivors of organized ritualistic abuse. Dr. Hanson notes that survivors frequently describe "forced choice" scenarios designed to induce unbearable guilt and that perpetrators use supernatural rhetoric to dominate victims psychologically.
Important limits on what is claimed here: This chapter does not assert that every survivor account of ritual abuse is literally accurate in all details. Memory under extreme trauma is fragile, and some accounts may reflect the psychological impact of abuse combined with dissociation rather than literal recall. What is established is that organized groups have used ceremonial staging to abuse children, that convictions have resulted, and that survivors deserve clinical care and belief — not reflexive dismissal.
Survivor Experience: Spiritual Dimensions of Abuse
Many survivors describe their experience of abuse in spiritual terms — feeling defiled, feeling that something was done to their soul, experiencing sleep-state disturbances they interpret as ongoing psychic assault. A 2019 pastoral doctorate at the University of Pretoria (G. Koopan, Astral Projection and the Abuse of Women: A Pastoral Challenge) documented women's accounts of sleep-state sexual violation and analyzed them within a spiritual/pastoral framework. The research was qualitative and conducted within a theology faculty — it records and interprets survivors' spiritual experiences; it is not a clinical neuroscience study establishing that out-of-body assault is physically possible.
What the research does affirm: survivors of spiritual abuse and occult exploitation experience real trauma with real psychological and physical after-effects, and pastoral and clinical responses must take these experiences seriously, regardless of the metaphysical framework the survivor uses to describe them.
For survivors who use the language of spiritual attack, demonic oppression, or astral violation: your experience is real, your trauma is real, and healing support is available. Clinical trauma therapy, spiritual direction, and community care are all legitimate parts of recovery. Many survivors describe healing through both psychological integration and spiritual practice — prayer, renunciation of coerced oaths or affiliations, and reconnection with a loving source of meaning.
Healing and the Path Forward
Whether the hidden space was a mud cave, a ceremonial location, or an ordinary room made terrifying by what happened there, the principle is the same: concealment was used as a weapon. Abusers depend on secrecy, on physical isolation, on the belief that no one will come. Recovery involves reclaiming the truth — insisting that what happened was real, was witnessed, and is named.
Approaches that have shown clinical benefit for survivors of organized and ritual abuse include:
- Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT)
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
- DID-informed integration therapy (ISSTD guidelines)
- Spiritual counseling and community belonging
The survivor-defined meaning of recovery often involves both psychological healing and spiritual restoration — reversing the lies perpetrators instilled, reclaiming agency, and reconnecting to goodness.
End of Chapter Seven
Fact-check log: /factcheck/logs/fdtl-08.md — 28 claims verified, June 2026