by Richard Beck
As she walks from room to room the camera occasionally catches her face from a sufficiently close distance to reveal that her colorful and extravagant clothes and makeup resemble the interior of the preschool. She wears outlandish costume jewelry, jangly medallions, lots of rings, long nails. She has big gray hair and big, spectacular glasses and red lipstick. “This is our happy face closet,” she says. “This is where I keep my supplies. And this is the bulletin board. Each month we do a different thing. There’s some more toys down here.” She gestures toward big yellow buckets. If the date in the corner of the screen is correct, this is the last day Peggy will ever spend at work. The school closed on January 13, never to reopen. As the camera follows Peggy out into the yard, it sees that she has a red flower in her hair too, and then she goes through a door that says “Charlie Room” on the front. She says, “This is where Ray Buckey sat right here.”1
In March of the previous year a woman named Judy Johnson had called the McMartin Preschool to ask about enrolling her two-and-a-half year-old son. She was told the school could not accept any new children for the time being, but Johnson was determined and a little desperate. She had recently separated from her tax auditor husband, leaving her to look after the boy full-time. On March 15 she put a note in her son’s lunch bag explaining who he was, dropped him off at McMartin, and drove away. Peggy McMartin hadn’t previously known Judy Johnson or her son, but she decided the woman must have been under enormous stress to do something so rash. She let the boy stay.
Peggy McMartin Buckey’s mother, Virginia McMartin, was seventy-six years old, and by 1983 she had spent more time in Manhattan Beach than almost anybody else in the city—her residency dated back to the Great Depression. Then, as in the 1980s, Manhattan Beach was a long, narrow municipality running along the coast, with bungalows, houses, and little businesses crowding down toward the surf. “We moved from Inglewood because I loved to swim in the ocean,” Virginia told an interviewer.2 She worked as a riveter during World War II, which she thought was “fun,” and then one day in the early 1950s one of the teachers at a church nursery school where Virginia volunteered told her that she was very good with children. After a few years of night classes she got certified as a teacher. Then Virginia paid $10,000 for “Miss Dawn’s” preschool and replaced the sign with one bearing her own name. In 1966 she moved into a new building on one of Manhattan Beach’s busiest streets, and that is where she stayed until the early 1980s. She was an acerbic and imposing presence even later in life, when she was confined to a wheelchair. A parent of a child who had attended McMartin once brought her dogs along to pick up her children. One of them urinated on bushes in the yard in view of Virginia, and the parent felt that Virginia was chilly toward her from that point on.3 But it is a fact that the preschool Virginia ran was universally beloved in Manhattan Beach, no matter what parents would eventually say to reporters and to one another about hints they should have picked up on, ominous signs to which they should have paid closer attention. Over the course of twenty-eight years, 5,330 children attended Virginia’s school. “Every morning, year-round, I swam from 16th Street to the pier and back,” she said. “But not in the heart of the winter. I taught my children to swim in the ocean by holding them up by their suits.”4
Things briefly calmed down for Judy Johnson. She and her husband made their separation permanent, and she also found a job in retail. In the summer of 1983, however, Johnson became concerned about the condition of her son’s anus. One day in July she took Matthew to the emergency room and told the doctor that her son’s anus was itchy. The doctor wasn’t terribly concerned. Judy and Matthew went home.5 A month passed. On August 12 Johnson called the Manhattan Beach police. Her concerns were the same as in July, except that now she suspected criminal rather than strictly medical causes. She told police detective Jane Hoag that when she had sent Matthew to school the previous morning his anus had been normal, but when she had brought him home at the end of the day it had been red. There was only one male teacher, Ray Buckey, working at McMartin.
Johnson said that Matthew had recently begun to play doctor, running around pretending to give people shots or check them for fever, which Johnson found very alarming. Repeated questioning finally induced Matthew to reveal that he had learned this behavior from Ray Buckey. Johnson believed the “thermometer” had been Ray’s penis. Detective Hoag advised Johnson to take her son to the hospital, and at 8:30 that evening, after examining Matthew at the Kaiser Hospital in Harbor City, a doctor filed a suspected child abuse report. Over the weekend Johnson further questioned her son about what had happened at school, and then on Tuesday she called the police to provide Detective Hoag with two names; Johnson said Matthew had identified these other children as victims of Ray Buckey. On Wednesday Matthew was examined again, this time by two pediatricians at the Marion Davies Children’s Clinic at UCLA. His examining physicians filed a second suspected child abuse report. A week later, no warrant having been issued for his arrest, Ray Buckey boarded a flight for South Dakota. He was going to visit his sister, Peggy Ann, who was spending the summer at Wind Caves National Park.
Around this time, Judy Johnson began to reach out to other parents whose children attended McMartin. She called the parents of one of the children Matthew had named to inform them of her suspicions. The parents talked to their son and then called Judy back: the boy didn’t like Ray, but he denied having been molested at preschool. Johnson persisted. Detective Hoag, by this point, was making inquiries of her own. In the space of two days she called the parents of five other McMartin children, all of whom reported back that nothing had happened to their children. None of this eased Judy’s mind. She was disturbed by an incident in which Matthew had wandered into her room while Johnson was partially undressed. The boy looked at his mother and said, “Matthew wear bra.” Johnson told the police that Matthew had eventually revealed that Ray made him wear women’s underwear at McMartin.6
Ray Buckey played a lot of volleyball on Manhattan Beach, and among the surfers and other young men who spent their days on the Pacific, prevailing fashions dictated big, baggy shorts or swim trunks with no underwear beneath. When Manhattan Beach police arrested Ray on September 7, they made special note of the fact that Ray “was not wearing any underwear beneath his shorts.”7 The Buckeys sought help from an attorney, Don Kelly, who had previously assisted Ray with a drunk driving incident. Earlier that week police had searched the McMartin-Buckeys’ homes for pornography and other evidence of molestation, but they failed to turn anything up. Without any evidence to corroborate Johnson’s allegations and the doctor’s suspected child abuse reports, they briefly held Ray and then released him on $15,000 bail. The day after Ray’s arrest, the police decided it was time to expand the scope of their investigation.
The police department worked up a list of some two hundred children who were attending or had previously attended McMartin and then mailed a letter to their parents. The letter read as follows:
September 8, 1983
Dear Parent:
This Department is conducting a criminal investigation involving child molestation (288 P.C.). Ray Buckey, an employee of Virginia McMartin’s Pre-School, was arrested September 7, 1983 by this department.
The following procedure is obviously an unpleasant one, but to protect the rights of your children as well as the rights of the accused, this inquiry is necessary for a complete investigation.
Records indicate that your child has been or is currently a student at the pre-school. We are asking your assistance in this continuing investigation. Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim. Our investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include: oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense of “taking the child’s temperature.” Also photos may have been taken of children without their clothing. Any information from your child regarding having
ever observed Ray Buckey to leave a classroom alone with a child during any nap period, or if they have ever observed Ray Buckey tie up a child, is important.
Please complete the enclosed information form and return it to this Department in the enclosed stamped return envelope as soon as possible. We will contact you if circumstances dictate same.
We ask you to please keep this investigation strictly confidential because of the nature of the charges and the highly emotional effect it could have on our community. Please do not discuss this investigation with anyone outside your immediate family. Do not contact or discuss the investigation with Raymond Buckey, any member of the accused defendant’s family, or employees connected with the McMartin Preschool.
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE TO INDICATE THAT THE MANAGEMENT OF VIRGINIA MCMARTIN’S PRESCHOOL HAD ANY KNOWLEDGE OF THIS SITUATION AND NO DETRIMENTAL INFORMATION CONCERNING THE OPERATION OF THE SCHOOL HAS BEEN DISCOVERED DURING THIS INVESTIGATION. ALSO, NO OTHER EMPLOYEE IN THE SCHOOL IS UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR ANY CRIMINAL ACT.
Your prompt attention to this matter and reply no later than September 16, 1983 will be appreciated.
HARRY L. KUHLMEYER, JR.
Chief of Police
JOHN WEHNER, Captain8
The letter threw Manhattan Beach into an uproar. As Kuhlmeyer should have known they would, parents of McMartin children ignored his request that they not discuss the investigation outside their immediate families, and before long they were calling one another on the phone to trade rumors, exchange information, and seek corroboration for their own children’s stories. One parent who received the letter, Ruth Owen, immediately called another, Donna Mergili, who hadn’t, to let her know about the investigation. Ruth cried as she delivered the news, and then the two women hung up and spent the weekend asking their children what had happened to them. Ruth asked her daughter, Nina, whether kids at McMartin were ever made to take their clothes off, and although Nina said no, Ruth would later report to the police that she did not feel her daughter had been telling the truth.9 For her part, Donna Mergili immediately learned from her daughter, Tanya, that the children often played games with Ray at McMartin. Donna told the police and other parents that these games had likely served as a pretense or cover for sexual abuse. Tanya named two, in particular, that would become focal points for the long investigation that was to follow: the “horsey” game and “naked movie star,” the latter a fragment of a children’s rhyme that was popular in the early 1980s: “What you see is what you are / You’re a naked movie star.” The following Monday, Ruth took her daughter to the police for more questioning.
The city’s anxiety intensified through the end of September, with parents constantly stopping one another in church or on Manhattan Beach’s long, beautiful ocean promenade to learn the latest. One child told his parents that Ray Buckey took photographs, though he would not say of what or how often. Another parent went to the police to repeat her daughter’s revelation that she had “seen ‘Mr. Ray’s’ penis and had touched it,” information which, according to the parent, the girl had been “very reluctant” to give.10 Other parents came to the police with more frightening information, saying their children had reported being sodomized by Ray or that Ray had forced the kids to perform oral sex on him. Around Manhattan Beach, it became common for parents to look back on little incidents from the last few years and to drastically reevaluate their significance. One parent who had been told by a doctor that her child’s vaginal infection was caused by poor hygiene began to suspect a different explanation.11 Another wondered about an episode where her daughter, in the bathtub with her young brother, had suddenly tried to grab at her sibling’s penis. Another was disturbed by her child’s curiosity about breastfeeding. All told, the police received what they recorded in phone logs as eight “positive” responses from parents in the wake of their mass mailing.12
Even at this early stage, however, the investigation had problems. For one thing, some of the McMartin children’s stories had rapidly expanded beyond the accounts of fondling and nonpenetrative molestation that constitute the vast majority of child sex abuse, to the point that police seemed to be dealing with a set of crimes that could not possibly have gone unnoticed by the other teachers at McMartin. Parents were calling police detectives with stories of children tied up, anal penetration, photographs of the abuse, and yet none of the children had suffered injuries, no photographs or photographic equipment could be found, and none of the other McMartin teachers said they had witnessed any wrongdoing by Ray Buckey. One child told investigators that she had alerted Babette Spitler, another teacher at McMartin, to Ray’s abuse, and that Spitler had immediately called the police. But Spitler denied being told anything of the kind, and the police had no record of any call.13 And although many parents became convinced that Ray had abused their children, other parents were not convinced at all, and they soon began to resent what they saw as police detectives’ weird insistence that their children must have been victimized. One parent remembered ten phone calls from the police over the course of the fall, each of them informing her that her daughter’s name was repeatedly coming up in other children’s stories. At the detectives’ request, she questioned her daughter many times about McMartin, but every time her daughter said Ray hadn’t done anything wrong, and her mother believed her.14 For an investigative team that was trying to put together an internally consistent story about what had gone on at McMartin, all of this should have thrown up rather large red flags.
Although a number of McMartin parents supported the school’s staff in their claims of innocence, their support was not particularly active or vocal, and on October 6 the Buckey family’s attorney, Don Kelly, released a statement announcing that the school’s enrollment had dropped from forty-five students to just fifteen. Less than a week later, the Buckey family filed a $4.5 million lawsuit against the police department and the city of Manhattan Beach. The suit claimed that the family’s reputation and business had been ruined.15 Meanwhile the investigation continued to expand, this time beyond Manhattan Beach’s city limits into the political institutions of greater Los Angeles.
The city’s district attorney at that time, Robert Philibosian, was a little-known gubernatorial appointee, and his prospects in the upcoming election were not good. Opposing him for the office was a city attorney and career politician named Ira Reiner, a man with such widespread name recognition that a significant number of Californians thought he was already the state’s governor. As Philibosian and his staff cast around for a campaign issue to call their own, they came across a surprising public opinion poll. The poll asked Angelenos to identify the crime issues that most concerned them, and there at the top, right along with drugs, was child abuse.16 Philibosian decided that the Los Angeles district attorney’s office would open its own investigation of the McMartin Preschool, separate from the one being carried out by the police in Manhattan Beach, and he assigned Jean Matusinka, head of the DA’s sexual abuse prosecution unit, to take the lead. One of Matusinka’s first decisions—certainly her most important one—was to contact a local organization named Children’s Institute International and ask for Kee MacFarlane.
Kee MacFarlane first encountered the problem of child abuse in 1970 when she began working at a center for neglected children in Tucson, Arizona. She was twenty-three years old and just out of college with a degree in fine arts. Her time at the Arizona Children’s Home completely changed her life.17 Moved by her work with the children she met in the southwest, MacFarlane eventually enrolled at the University of Maryland for a degree in social work, and among other activities in the early 1970s she worked to establish new branches of Parents Anonymous in Baltimore and New Jersey.18 In 1976 she joined the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN), which had recently been opened as a result of Walter Mondale’s child abuse legislation, as a sex abuse specialist. Excited by her work and well funded by the federal government, MacFarlane distributed grant money, built up c
ontacts with specialists from around the country, and absorbed the psychotherapeutic approach to child abuse treatment around which NCCAN was organized. This work continued until 1982, when, as a result of the Reagan administration’s budget cuts, MacFarlane was laid off. She packed her bags that January and moved across the country to Los Angeles. She wanted to write a book.
In Washington, NCCAN had been an important and innovative participant in what was then still a rather new and underdeveloped field, but its ambitions had been restrained somewhat by the government supervision that came along with the government funding. California was different. The state had served as a kind of incubator for new institutional responses to child abuse, especially child sex abuse, since the early 1970s. Parents Anonymous, for example, the group whose founder, Jolly K, had pleased congressional Republicans with her testimony in 1973, was based in California, as was Parents United, a self-help group for incestuous families that was founded in Silicon Valley. In the southern half of the state, other professionals pioneered models of incest treatment and response that would soon take hold around the country. These models were usually organized around therapeutic programs designed to keep families together in the wake of incestuous abuse. The idea was to avoid an over-reliance on law enforcement, which tended to break families apart.
Michael Durfee, a doctor and the director of the Los Angeles County Health Department’s child abuse program, played a number of important roles in the evolution of child abuse detection and treatment. He reviewed infant death records, looking for cases in which probable homicides had been misclassified as death by accidental or natural causes. He developed an interest in traumatic dissociation and Multiple Personality Disorder in the wake of the publication of Michelle Remembers, and he began working with a woman who claimed to have recovered memories of childhood abuse at the hands of a violent satanic cult. He helped her report the ritual murders, for which no evidence was ever found, to the FBI. Most important, however, were his efforts to have preschoolers regarded as a group particularly threatened by sexual abuse. In the early 1980s he organized dozens of area abuse specialists into something he called the Preschool-Age Molested Children’s Professional Group. The group met six times per year, looking for ways to make the region’s courts, hospitals, and legislatures more responsive to these vulnerable children. Kee MacFarlane began to participate in these meetings soon after her arrival in Los Angeles.19