A slightly-built man with thinning gray hair and glasses, Marion Knox takes the stage with his five brothers with quiet authority.
He is the sound technician, a baritone and the master of ceremonies, the one who introduces the rest of the band. The oldest of the six boys born to Vernon and Elsie Knox, Marion Knox grew up on a grass seed farm near Harrisburg. He and his wife, Doris, have been married for 53 years.
The Knox Brothers began singing gospel together 43 years ago, he tells the audience at an assisted living facility in Eugene. A couple of decades later, they began performing at recreational vehicle parks for “snowbird” travelers.
“We thought we were singing to the old folks,” he says with a slight smile. “Well, guess what. We are the old folks.”
A grass seed farmer, licensed pilot and the founder of Knox Construction, now run by his sons, Marion Knox is still perhaps best known for the music. The Knox Brothers perform some 50 shows per year.
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Knox doesn’t talk about memory therapy behind the microphone, or about Stephan Skotko’s lawsuit, which accuses him of instilling false memories in Skotko’s family that led police to charge Skotko with abuse. On the advice of his lawyer, he doesn’t talk much at all.
“Am I still counseling people?” he says following the Eugene show. “I’m not a counselor. But look — ” pressing his hand on the reporter’s shoulder for emphasis — “no comment.”
By all accounts, Knox has never held himself out to be a professional therapist, missionary or minister. But his status as an informal family counselor, spiritual adviser and someone with the ability to help “deliver” people from satanic ritual abuse is well documented.
He gave interviews in the 1990s with conspiracy researchers in which he told them he had begun regularly counseling “those who were ritually abused” in 1993, and that prior to that he had counseled people who had “common sex abuse.”
In the interviews, Knox outlined in detail his beliefs that Catholics, Freemasons and others were practicing mind control by sodomizing young children, which caused them to become possessed by demons. He spoke locally on radio broadcasts on connections between such abuse and the development of multiple personalities.
In 2001, Knox’s counseling was called into question over a court case involving a Brownsville man who was charged with abuse by a girl whom Knox had counseled. Charges against the man eventually were dropped.
Knox spoke on “Deliverance” with members of Northwest Ministries at a Spiritual Warfare Advanced Training workshop in Portland about a decade ago. He outlined in detail for his audience his methods for uncovering subconscious memories, including the use of “triggers” such as pictures of pagan rituals.
Evil spirits enter children who have been abused, he wrote in handouts to the SWAT audience. Healing, he said, comes from removing the “Legion” program, which is installed in a victim by sodomy at age 3.
“The Illuminati handshake or Masonic aprons may cause reactions in those who have been abused in Masonic or Illuminati rituals,” he wrote. “Reaction to your hand on their throat will indicate that they have been choked.”
Families who received counseling from Knox told the Democrat-Herald he saw himself only as a devout Christian who happened to have a gift for working with families as part of home Bible studies.
“He’s passionate,” said Dana Klinkner of Vancouver, Wash., who underwent an RMT counseling session at the Knox farm in Lebanon in 1999 as part of ongoing treatment with a counselor in the Portland area. “He feels like he didn’t ask for this, (but) that he has the discernment.”
Knox has not publicly discussed how he came by his beliefs in satanic ritual abuse.
The family was active in church and all the brothers hold “conservative, evangelical, Bible-based beliefs,” according to a comment Ed Knox wrote on the Knox Brothers website.
Choral director Louis Lehman of Albany, who first met Knox when he hired him for construction work in 1984 and later directed him and his brothers as part of church Christmas concerts, said he’d always been impressed by Knox’s faith.
Knox, Lehman said, is a softspoken man with a deep sense of commitment to God and to doing the right thing, whether it was for work or his family.
“Marion is not a man who would accuse someone of (having) that nature,” Lehman said of Skotko’s claims that Knox prompted his family to accuse him of abuse. “I’m sure if he did, it was based strongly on his belief of the Scriptures.”
Longtime friend Emerson Smoker of RiteWay Electric in Albany said he knew Knox through both work and the Mennonite religious community, to which both men used to belong.
About 30 years ago, he said, Knox attended Fairview Mennonite Church and Smoker attended Plainview Mennonite Church. The men frequently were on construction jobs together.
Smoker said Knox’s honesty, integrity and dedication made him highly respected in the contracting business. “I was always proud to be on his jobs because he wasn’t a shoddy worker,” he said.
Smoker never received counseling with Knox, nor, he said, did Knox offer any. Smoker remembers no discussions of sexual abuse and only one time when satanism cropped up in the discussion: something about a family Knox once knew who was experiencing problems related to satanic books stored in an attic.
At the time, Smoker said, he believed he and Knox felt the same way about the situation: that the books needed to be removed because they were allowing evil a toehold that would draw even greater evil to the family.
“We never got that involved in the spiritual side of things because we were busy working, but I always thought, spiritually, we were on the same level,” Smoker said. “I held him in high esteem as far as his belief.”
Tomorrow:
One family’s experience with implanted memory
