We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  We Believe the Children

  We Believe the Children

  A Moral Panic in the 1980s

  Richard Beck

  Copyright © 2015 by Richard Beck

  Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beck, Richard, 1986–

  We believe the children : a moral panic in the 1980s / Richard Beck. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61039-288-4 (e-book) 1. Child sexual abuse—United States—History—20th century. 2. Ritual abuse—United States—History—20th century. 3. Child care workers—United States—History—20th century. 4. False arrest—United States—History—20th century. 5. Moral panics—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

  HV6570.2.B43 2015

  362.760973'09048—dc23

  2015011572

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For n + 1 and for Garry Lee Snodgrass

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 The Discovery of Child Abuse

  Chapter 2 McMartin—Allegations

  Chapter 3 Prosecutors

  Chapter 4 McMartin—The Preliminary Hearing

  Chapter 5 FBI, DSM, XXX

  Chapter 6 McMartin—The Trial

  Chapter 7 Two Families

  Chapter 8 McMartin—The Verdict

  Chapter 9 Therapists and Survivors

  Chapter 10 Repression and Desire

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Author’s Note

  In order to protect the privacy of children discussed in this book, pseu­donyms have been used in place of given names. These pseudonyms match those used in two other books on this subject: Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker; and The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children, by Ross E. Cheit. Where I mention children not previously discussed in either of these two books, I have assigned new pseudonyms. Furthermore, if a child is referred to by a pseudonym, his or her parents are as well.

  I have made two kinds of exceptions to this practice. In cases where a child has made his or her real name a matter of public record by speaking out as an adult, I use the real name. Similarly, given names are used for parents who became public figures in their own right—who spoke to reporters on behalf of an activist group, for example—over the course of the investigations and trials. In the endnotes, I indicate whether a real name or pseudonym is used.

  Why are the accused witches’ confessions under torture so like the communications made by my patients in psychic treatment?

  —Sigmund Freud, 1897

  The average American is just like the child in the family.

  —Richard Nixon, 1972

  Introduction

  In the late summer of 1983, residents of a beachfront city in southwestern Los Angeles began to suspect that their children were in danger. In August, the mother of a child who had attended the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach told the police that her two-year-old son had been molested by one of his teachers. In September, police arrested the accused teacher and charged him with three counts of child abuse. They also mailed a letter to some two hundred parents of current and former McMartin students, alerting them to the investigation and requesting their assistance. These parents, by and large, were affluent and successful professionals, often working in real estate or the aerospace industry. Many of them had put their children on a lengthy waiting list in the hopes of getting them into what was, at the time, the most respected preschool in the city. In October, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office asked social workers to interview children who had attended the school, and by November the evaluations were under way. The McMartin Preschool closed down for good, after twenty-eight years of operation, in January 1984.

  It would be almost another month before any news organization published or broadcast a report. By that oint social workers had interviewed dozens of current and former McMartin students, and the police investigation had grown considerably. “Authorities now believe that at least sixty children were victimized,” a reporter with the local ABC affiliate said.1 Each of those sixty children, he went on to say, “had been keeping a grotesque secret of being sexually abused and made to appear in pornographic films while in the preschool’s care, and of being forced to witness the mutilation and killing of animals to scare the kids into being silent.” Police and district attorney investigators searched homes, local businesses, and an Episcopal church, and they also called up a national park in South Dakota in search of evidence. Six other former McMartin employees, including the school’s seventy-seven-year-old founder, were arrested. Speaking to a news reporter, the mother of one of the children who had attended McMartin said that there was no doubt in her mind “or in anybody else’s mind” that her son had been abused. “You cannot—he cannot—have made any of this up. There is no way.”2

  Bizarre as these allegations may have been—one therapist hired by the prosecution used the word “unthinkable” to describe what took place at McMartin—they were not without precedent, at least not in California.3 Some 125 miles up Interstate 5, which cuts away from the coast into California’s more conservative and agricultural Central Valley Region, a similar investigation was unfolding. In 1982, Mary Ann Barbour, a woman living in Bakersfield, obtained custody of her stepgrandchildren. Barbour believed that her stepdaughter Debbie’s two daughters were being molested by Debbie’s stepfather and that their parents were not doing enough to protect them from further harm. Over the course of interviews conducted by Kern County officials, the sisters reportedly said that they had been abused by Debbie’s stepfather and their father. As these interviews progressed, the children gradually revealed that they had been suspended from hooks in a ceiling, beaten with belts and other implements, made to perform in pornographic film shoots, and rented to strangers in motels around the area. They said many other children had also been abused. In 1984 the girls’ parents, along with two other members of what prosecutors said was a clandestine sex ring operating throughout Kern County, were given a combined sentence of exactly one thousand years in prison. More than thirty people were convicted of participating in a network of sex rings.

  The word “epidemic” became an important feature of the political and rhetorical landscape in the 1980s. Whether the epidemics themselves were real, as in the case of AIDS, or imagined, as in the case of “crack babies,” the rhetoric that surrounded them portrayed American society as menaced on all sides by conspiracies and dire threats.4 Child sexual abuse officially took its place among these other threats at a 1984 hearing of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, where Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania sai
d, “the molestation of children has now reached epidemic proportions.”5 His warning was confirmed by stories in newspapers and on television stations around the country. In Jordan, a tiny town to the southwest of Minneapolis, police investigators and FBI agents prepared to search the banks of the Minnesota River for bodies allegedly deposited there by a small boy’s abusers. Twenty-four people, including two police officers and residents of a trailer park on the far side of Route 169, were accused of abusing dozens of children. The chairman of the Jordan school board told a reporter that many Jordanites had become “embarrassed to tell people where we even live.”6 In Niles, Michigan, the son of one preschool owner was sentenced to fifty to seventy-five years in prison. Children at the school said the man had photographed their abuse, made them take drugs, unearthed corpses, and sacrificed—not killed, but sacrificed—animals. In Malden, Massachusetts, the owner of a day care center and her two adult children were accused of abusing forty students in a place called the “magic room.” In Chicago a janitor at a community child care facility was accused of boiling and eating a baby. Other staff members were charged with 246 counts of abuse and assault.

  One witness at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing testified to the difficulty of prosecuting cases that rested largely on the testimony of young and frightened children. She said courtrooms needed to have towels on hand for when kids “go in the back room and throw up all over you, they are so terrified.” She said that children were “the perfect victims of the perfect crime.”7 One case in Miami, however, suggested that this witness may have exaggerated the difficulty of obtaining a conviction. In 1985, a thirty-six-year-old man on trial for the abuse of fifteen children at a home-based babysitting service asked that he be permitted to sit in the courtroom while his wife, who was also accused of participating in the abuse, offered testimony. “She cannot lie in front of me,” Frank Fuster told the judge. “I need her to be here in person so she can see what’s going on. When we see each other in person, have eye contact, my wife will not be able to lie.”8 Judge Newman granted the request, and so Fuster would eventually watch in person as Ileana told the jury that her husband had worn a white sheet and a strange mask, that he had sexually assaulted her with a crucifix, and that he had forced her to abuse the children along with him. “And he was naked,” Ileana said, referring to one of the children, “and Frank was—was kissing the body. . . .” At this point Frank leapt from his chair and shouted, “You are a liar! God is gonna punish you for this!”9 Ileana screamed, slumped down behind the wall of the witness box, and covered her face with trembling hands. Frank was found guilty. He received a sentence of six consecutive life terms, with additional time added for parole violation. In exchange for her testimony, Ileana received ten years. At her sentencing hearing she was seated next to Dade County state attorney Janet Reno, for whom the verdict represented a significant victory.

  The dangers of babysitting services and day care centers became a national news media fixation. Plummeting enrollment numbers and surging insurance premiums forced many centers to close down, and newspapers reported that some day care directors were advising their employees to avoid physical contact with children if at all possible, advice intended not to protect children from molestation but rather to protect employees from accusations of sexual assault. Popular and academic presses published sociological studies on abuse, journalists’ accounts of some of the early trials, and memoirs by parents of abused children. Their titles effectively suggest the tone of their contents: Unspeakable Acts, Nursery Crimes, Not My Child. All the while, allegations of sexual torture and child pornography production continued to emerge in El Paso and in suburban New Jersey. At the day care center run by the US Military Academy at West Point, rumors swirled about satanic ritual abuse and a possible connection to another army base in San Francisco. In 1984 and 1985, the television newsmagazine 20/20 aired “The Best Kept Secret” and “Why the Silence?,” two lengthy examinations of the McMartin Preschool case, which still had not gone to trial. “Choose a nursery school very carefully,” reporter Tom Jarriel warned.10 “Almost every month has brought new stories from all parts of the country indicating that sexual abuse may be more common than any of us had imagined.” Jarriel talked to “one of the army’s leading authorities on brainwashing,” who explained how the McMartin teachers were able to maintain their victims’ silence for so many years.11 At the end of one of these segments, Jarriel emphasized that “the defendants in this case are innocent until proven guilty.” But rather than take up this line of thinking even for a moment, anchor Hugh Downs immediately pivoted back to the assumption that lay at the foundation of the whole broadcast. “How deeply marked are these children, Tom?” he asked. “Will they ever recover from it?”

  “Psychologically, perhaps never,” Jarriel replied. “One little boy, for example, asked his mother, ‘Mommy, when I die, will the bad memories go away?’”

  There was a brief pause. “My God,” Downs said. “Thank you, Tom.”12 Legislatures took action to fend off the new threats facing the country’s children. Multiple states passed laws that created new hearsay exceptions for trials involving abused children, meaning that parents, social workers, and police officers could take the stand and speak for the child victims they represented. The 1984 Child Protection Act removed all First Amendment protections from media defined as child pornography, which had been completely legal until 1977, and it also legislated millions of new children into being by raising the age of minority from sixteen to eighteen. Although the Reagan administration spent much of its time in power easing the federal government’s financial commitment to social welfare programs, funds poured into new organizations and institutes looking to protect the country’s most vulnerable class of citizens. These laws transformed the state’s relationship to children, and they were aggressively pursued by law enforcement agencies and prosecutors’ offices, often at the urging of activist groups organized and run by parents of children involved in the day care cases. Some states passed bills that allowed children to testify from outside the courtroom via closed-circuit television so that they would not have to undergo the further trauma of seeing their abusers in person. Many parents involved with the ritual abuse cases would have been otherwise unwilling to allow their children to testify in court, and without the child witnesses, prosecutors believed their cases were doomed.

  Eyewitness testimony is a crucial component of many criminal proceedings, but prosecutors and parents working on the day care cases had good reason for special concern. As the defendants and their lawyers had been noting from the outset, police investigators were almost never able to find any physical evidence to corroborate the grotesque charges. Although this is true of most child sex abuse investigations, the majority of which involve fondling and other forms of contact that do not cause medically detectable injury or produce forensically detectable evidence, the day care ritual abuse trials were not anything like most child sex abuse investigations. In North Carolina, children said that their teachers had thrown them out of a boat into a school of sharks.13 In Los Angeles, children said that one of their teachers had forced them to watch as he hacked a horse to pieces with a machete.14 In New Jersey, children said their teacher had raped them with knives, forks, and wooden spoons, and a child in Miami told investigators about homemade pills their caretakers had forced them to eat. The pills, the child said, looked like candy corn, and they made all of the children sleepy.15 Children in various cases said they had been taken to graveyards, sometimes to kill baby tigers and sometimes to dig up bodies, which were removed from their coffins and stabbed. In addition, the sex rings said to be operating in cities like Jordan, Minnesota, and Bakersfield, California, supposedly involved regular meetings, wild parties, elaborate religious ceremonies, and the production of child pornography, all witnessed by many people. (These wilder stories often took time to develop out of the more mundane allegations in which cases originated, but once they did develop they came to monopolize the at
tention of investigators and journalists.) Despite the numbers of people said to be involved, despite all of the different implements the defendants were said to have used, and despite the brutality of the violence they were believed to have inflicted on the children they cared for, prosecutors asked their child witnesses to do nearly all of the heavy lifting in court. No pornography, no blood, no semen, no weapons, no mutilated corpses, no sharks, and no satanic altars or robes were ever found.

  Prosecutors, parents, and therapists dealt with this problem by repeating what became a common refrain. Set aside the lack of corroborating evidence, they said, and consider this basic fact: children all over the country were fighting through fear and shame to come forward and say they had been abused—how could a decent society ignore these stories? Therapists pointed to their own profession’s long and inglorious history of ignoring children who tried speak out about abuse, and they said this was a mistake the country could not afford to repeat. “All children who are sexually abused anywhere,” one abuse expert said at the National Symposium on Child Molestation in 1984, “need to have their credibility recognized and to have advocates working for them. Among the things that is most damaging is the sense of being alone and having no one to talk to.”16

  The social stigma associated with child abuse has a long, well-documented history, and today it remains a painful experience for many people who try to seek help or go public with accounts of victimization. As defense attorneys, journalists, and research psychologists associated with the day care trials eventually pointed out, however, this social stigma was not actually relevant to these cases because the allegations hadn’t come from the children to begin with.

  In New Jersey, an investigator with the Department of Youth and Family Services named Lou Fonolleras interviewed children who attended the Wee Care Day Nursery. One Friday in June 1985, Fonolleras asked a child about his experiences there: