In the world of national children's-rights crusader Faye Yager, a shadowy satanic brotherhood manipulates the nation's courts, haunts its police departments and allows children to suffer unspeakable evil.
A 30-room English Tudor mansion - complete with housekeeper, gardener and gray Rolls Royce parked outside - protects Yager from that world.It is the headquarters for her underground network, through which she says thousands of volunteers in all 50 states hide hundreds of children.
Police came to the house in April with a search warrant, looking for files or videotapes to back up a Florida woman's claim that Yager tried to browbeat the woman's children into accusing their father of satanism and abuse.
Since Yager's arrest April 14 on related charges, Cobb County police have received calls from throughout the country, many on behalf of fathers who hope the network will be dismantled and their missing children returned, said police Lt. Robert Pittman.
"It's very frustrating to a father who's been cleared of any wrongdoing whatsoever to know there's a nationwide organization whose avowed purpose is to remove children from the jurisdiction of our courts," said Thomas A. Massey, an Evansville, Ind., attorney.
Massey represents John Rademacher, whose ex-wife and 8-year-old daughter, Sara, have been missing since last November, presumably hidden in Yager's network.
Authorities seized about 40 files and tapes from Yager's home, but she said the network is safe.
"I'm not stupid. I don't keep anything that's going to lead to any kids. But they don't know that," she said.
A former interior designer, Yager, 40, started Children of the Underground three years ago to shelter abuse victims she believes have been abandoned by the court system. She estimates she has helped at least 500 families, with one to six children each.
The case against Yager, which is expected to go before a grand jury this summer, involves a Florida woman who said she asked the organization for protection because her husband physically abused her, their 8-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son.
Yager is charged with kidnapping the boy and subjecting him to cruel verbal treatment; a kidnapping charge involving the girl later was reduced to interfering with the custody of a child.
Police contend Yager threatened to send the children back to their father, who she said would beat them, if they refused to make accusations against him.
Cobb County District Attorney Tom Charron described Yager as a woman with good intentions who has become obsessed.
Yager denies the criminal charges. But she does not entirely disagree with Charron's assessment.
"I am obsessed," she conceded during an interview at her home in an affluent Sandy Springs neighborhood in suburban Atlanta. "I'm obsessed with a legal system, a system designed to protect that which it destroys. I'm obsessed with this cult business that is allowed to operate. These people are Ozzie and Harriet by day and get away with it."
She claims many prominent lawyers and judges are "generational satanists" brought up to believe in Satan.
In the basement file cabinet where she files records by state, "cult" cases are earmarked with bright orange tabs.
Seated on a settee in a room surrounded by antiques, she strings together story after story of children who say they were abused, many by fathers or relatives involved in the occult. In a voice often just above a whisper, she talks of girls used as satanic "breeders" to carry fetuses that their tormentors later sacrifice.
At times, she stops to introduce a grandmother who works with the network, or to chat with an abused teenager. The youth is one of the changing number of house guests that vary with her caseload, she said.
The case against her, Yager vowed, never will go to trial. She contends the police and FBI agents assisting in the investigation are harassing her family and trying to destroy her credibility, especially among law enforcement officials who trusted her.
"My credibility has been tarnished, tarred and feathered. I've been slandered," she said.
Her history with Cobb County authorities dates back to 1973, when the courts awarded custody of her own daughter, Michelle, to the child's father, Roger Lee Jones, even though Yager claimed he had sexually abused the girl.
She launched her underground crusade in 1987, the year after Jones was indicted on nine counts of child molestation involving three minors in Venice, Fla. He still awaits trial on the charges.
Memories of what happened to her daughter, who now lives with Yager and her third husband, keep her bent on helping other children, she said.
FBI Agent Jeff Holmes accompanied police on the search of Yager's house a few days after her arrest, but won't say whether the FBI has undertaken a broad investigation of the network.
Charron said that until the missing children or the locations where they are being hidden are found, authorities can do nothing.
"Until you have the children or proof of where they are, you don't have the elements of a crime," he said.
Any broad action involving the network would be up to the FBI because Cobb County has limited jurisdiction, Charron said.
Yager's critics call her a media princess carried away with publicity.
Denise Gooch, one of the founders of a national group called the Mothers Alliance for the Rights of Children, which Yager also helped start, described her as a "reporter's dream and a parent's nightmare."
She was asked to leave because of philosophical differences shortly after the group started, and began her own network the same year, said another founder, Sarah King.
Yager admits she doesn't shun attention.
She traveled to a preliminary hearing in Cobb County in her husband's Rolls Royce, driven by her gardener. Wearing a hat, a flowered dress and a corsage, she listened as her attorney argued she should not bear court costs because she is indigent.
"Howard Yager doesn't have to pay for attorneys for his wife. I have no income," she said, adding that she transferred her property and money into her husband's name before starting the underground.
Authorities have criticized Yager's interview techniques with children, contending she intimidates them and often introduces the subject of satanism.
"She's not objective," said Pittman, the Cobb County police lieutenant. "We feel she intimidates the child into saying things that aren't true."
Some videotapes, Pittman said, show Yager "screaming and hollering at kids, threatening to send them back into an abusive situation."
Yager, who has the children sit in a high-backed Renaissance-style chair in her library while she videotapes them, denied she is abusive.
"I'm very blunt about things," she said. "I tell them, `You're at the end of the road. If I can't help you, not many people out there are going to."'
She also denied bringing up satanism, saying, "I don't want to believe things like that are going on. I'm being forced to believe it."
Helen Russell, a friend who has watched some of the interviews, defended Yager's style and her findings about cults.
"Isn't it easier to think one woman is crazy," Russell asked, "than to think our society has gotten so perverted?"