During his many months of investigation, Jerome Clark
had talked with Ross Doyen, a
Kansas state senator who, in late en , had found a 500-pound heifer dead on his farm, with a six-inch
hole carved in its belly. When a report of the incident was carried in Kansas newspapers, Doyen told Clark, he was
contacted by Bankston, who at the time was serving a sentence for bank robbery at the Leavenworth (Kansas) Federal
Penitentiary. Bankston wrote to Doyen that the mutilations were the work of a clandestine society of Satan, which had
decided to expand its public viciousness.
Doyen did not place much credibility in Bankston's story, but this did not deter Clark from calling the warden at Leavenworth and, obtaining permission to correspond with the inmate.
There followed an exchange of letters, in which Bankston's first missive—dated January 23, 1974—told clark that "this cult is of Satan", that its members scarfed the animals' blood with hypodermic needles and that the animals' "sex organs are taken for... fertility rites". Bankston alleged in subsequent letters that the satan cult was also involved in some way with the bombing of the Army math lab at the University of Wisconsin in August 1970, a grim deed that left a university researcher dead. Most terrifying of all, Bankston claimed that the animal mutilations are but a prelude to what we shall here call hum-sac, or human sacrifice.
Bankston was quick to tell Clark that he wanted to help authorities round up the cultists, but he was afraid of reprisals within the prison system. He asked that Clark intervene to have him and some other possible informants removed to a jail in Minnesota where they could talk more freely.
Clark could not help Bankston and had allowed his correspondence with him to lapse by the time he contacted Flickinger in early en . When Flickinger met with Clark shortly thereafter and heard more details of the "cult of Satan", the seeds of a large and mysterious Federal investigation were brought to shoot on over the next few months, the cattle mutilations spread like a psychotic epidemia into 22 Western states.