by Richard Beck
Some of the group’s ideas were rather sensible. Its members noticed, for example, that suspected child abuse victims were often repeatedly interviewed over the course of an investigation and that the frequency and intensity of these interviews could be traumatic.20 First, a child might be interviewed by someone at Child Protective Services. Then a doctor might conduct another interview to obtain a medical history before conducting an exam. Then police detectives might visit a child, maybe more than once, and then the child might be asked to tell his or her story again, either before a grand jury or in open court. MacFarlane and a few other members of Dr. Durfee’s group hit upon the idea of videotaping the child’s first interview. If conducted in a sufficiently thorough and competent manner, a recording of this interview could then theoretically satisfy the needs of investigators working in many different departments and prevent the child from having to confront yet another strange adult in some fluorescent-lit government building.
MacFarlane and her colleagues also embraced some riskier ideas that were being developed around this time. Although the idea was completely unfamiliar to law enforcement, psychotherapists had long used different forms of play as a means of connecting with child patients and encouraging them to open up. A casual drawing or coloring session might precede more serious therapeutic conversation. Toys would be made available to the child for use during breaks. The use of hand puppets was common. MacFarlane believed these techniques could also be helpful in forensic interviews with suspected child abuse victims, interviews in which the main priority, by definition, had to be the accurate recall of events rather than the emotional well-being of the child.21 And because she had started work at a nonprofit called Children’s Institute International shortly after she had joined Dr. Durfee’s professional group, she soon had a chance to put her theories into practice.
In Manhattan Beach a number of McMartin parents complained about the police department’s investigation, saying that Detective Hoag was too aggressive in her interviewing. Assistant District Attorney Matusinka requested that children be interviewed at CII, partially in the hope that children could be interviewed “in a non-traumatic therapeutic setting.” This was a seemingly benign thing to hope for, but it went on to cause problems for the interviewers at CII, and it became the subject of major debate at the trial that was eventually to come. Trial transcripts suggest that Matusinka, MacFarlane, and the others at CII were not entirely on the same page about the purpose of the interviews that were about to take place.22 In a purely therapeutic setting the doctor or social worker can sometimes make the decision to prioritize a patient’s psychological or emotional truth over the truth that is actually out there in the world. However, a forensic interview needs to elicit statements that can hold up before a judge and a jury in criminal court. And although MacFarlane and CII had evaluated child abuse victims for the DA’s office before—one assistant district attorney described their work on those cases as excellent—they had not previously taken on anything like a case of this size.23 MacFarlane’s untested efforts “to try to combine” these two types of interviews—the therapeutic and the forensic—were therefore brought to bear on a type of case with which CII was totally unfamiliar.24
Once Matusinka’s request came in, however, MacFarlane prepared to begin very quickly. Her interview room was filled with children’s toys and tiny furniture, and the walls were coated in bright paint. MacFarlane brought in assistants to work the video equipment and conduct interviews of their own, and she dressed them and herself in colorful, goofy clothes. They decided to encourage their interview subjects to speak through puppets—a Pac-Man doll, an alligator, a dog named “Detective Dog”—when they wanted to communicate some “yucky secret” they were too frightened to share on their own. Finally, MacFarlane planned to use anatomically correct dolls, which came in both child and adult versions and included penises, vaginas, breasts, and pubic hair. Kids would be encouraged to use the dolls to demonstrate how their abuse had taken place. (This eventually gave rise to the cliché, “Show me on the doll where the bad man touched you.”) Two weeks after Matusinka’s letter MacFarlane was ready to start.
For detectives in Manhattan Beach, the interviews could not have started soon enough. Throughout October Judy Johnson had deluged Detective Hoag with elaborate and surreal allegations. On September 30, according to a police report, Johnson reported “that in further discussion had with Matthew he related having been sodomized by Ray while his head was put in the toilet. Matthew also mentioned something about Ray wearing a mask to his mother.”25 Johnson also told Detective Hoag that Matthew had been acting out, including a number of incidents in which her son attempted to tie her up. On October 17 Johnson called the station again:
Judy Johnson provided [reporting officer] with additional information obtained from Matthew: Matthew related that a song “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater” was sung after which Raymond Buckey sucked said victim’s penis; Matthew related having been masturbated by Ray; Matthew said he had been put in a closet by Ray and in a high place; Matthew hurt by Ray following a Hide N Seek game. . . . Ray apparently took Matthew’s blood pressure and sometimes the blood pressure cuff had Ray’s penis in same; Matthew was given a shot by Ray. . . .26
On October 19, Judy called Detective Hoag again: “Matthew related to his mother that he had seen Ray wear some kind of a cape. Matthew also related having sat on Ray’s lap and that it hurt. The victim has described Ray as having inserted some kind of an air tube in his rectum.” The next day Judy called to say that Ray once dressed up like a minister while abusing her son.27 The detectives investigating the McMartin Preschool were not much given to expressing doubts, but one might notice a bit of uncertainty in Hoag’s use of “apparently” in her October 17 report. Somebody needed to sort and verify these allegations before they made the case totally impossible.
Kee MacFarlane conducted her first interview with a McMartin student on November 1, 1983. The subject was a four-year-old girl named Ella Baldwin, and MacFarlane took her time to build up a rapport. The pair chatted about pets. Ella said her family kept a snake and that although they had also kept a dog, the dog had died. “Aww,” MacFarlane said. “Was he just old?” Ella nodded her head, and MacFarlane said, “Old dogs die,” and then Ella heard about MacFarlane’s cat.28 This went on for a while: coloring, comments about the toys in the room, ordinary questions about Ella’s classmates at McMartin. It isn’t until the thirty-third page of the interview transcript that MacFarlane alluded to the subject of the police investigation at all, and even then the allusion was oblique:
Q: Was it, your teacher was a boy?
A: Yeah.
Q: Oh, what was his name?
A: His name was Ray.
Q: Ray. . . . I see. Did you like him? Was he a good teacher?
A: No.
Q: No?
A: He was bad.
Q: Oh he was bad. What did he do? Why was he bad?
A: Because, sometime he, my ma, my mom said sometimes he tied up kids.29
Here, already, the complications involved with investigating a case like McMartin were clear. No sooner had MacFarlane obtained her first statements about Ray’s criminal acts than the child attributed those statements not to her own experience but rather to something her mother told her. With Ella, as with a number of other children interviewed in November, MacFarlane proceeded carefully, at least at first. Four times she asked Ella whether she had personally seen Ray tie up kids, and all of Ella’s responses were negative. MacFarlane let the subject drop and soon brought out a set of anatomically correct dolls. Together, MacFarlane and Ella undressed the dolls to get a look at their special features. “She has her hole under her,” MacFarlane said, spreading a female doll’s legs. “See her little hole? Just like you, right?”30 They reviewed a boy doll as well, and then, with Ella still absorbed with poring over the boy doll, MacFarlane asked, “Did you ever see any of the kids in your old school take their
clothes off?” Ella said, “Nope,” and again MacFarlane didn’t press her point. More games follow. Holding an adult male doll, Ella assumes a dad’s voice and tells the other dolls to have dinner and take a bath. “Anybody ever take a bath in school?” MacFarlane asked. Again, “Nope.” Ella then ignored a few more questions about Ray.
For a brief moment, the child seemed to allude to something that might have interested MacFarlane, identifying Ray as the teacher who told her “not to talk about it.”31 But the “it” to which Ella was referring—whether Ray ever took her clothes off—was something she had already said, earlier in the interview, didn’t happen. When MacFarlane asked her to pretend the dolls were other children from her class at McMartin, Ella mentioned five names, none of which matched the names of any of her classmates. Then Ella told MacFarlane, “No one gets tied up,” and when MacFarlane kept to the subject anyway, Ella said that she did get tied up but that it happened outside, on the playground, which was right beside one of Manhattan Beach’s busiest streets.32 She also said that Ray did nothing while she was tied up and that her clothes were on. The variety and inconsistency of Ella’s statements suggest that she was not speaking from memory but simply playing, which is essentially what MacFarlane had asked her to do in the toy-filled room. After MacFarlane asked again whether clothes ever came off, Ella says that Ray undressed two girls who, again, were not in her class.33 Then Ella made the Ray doll fondle one of the tied-up children. MacFarlane seemed to be getting somewhere, but then this exchange occurred:
A: A big, a big mommy came around.
Q: A big mommy came into the room?
A: Yep. And she, she camed up. . . . She tied up him.
Q: Is that the truth?
A: No, it’s just a story.
Q: Oh, that’s just a story. What about the part with Julia, was that the truth?
A: It’s all a story.34
MacFarlane spent the rest of the interview circling back to the question of whether Ray had put his finger in or on Ella’s vagina, and although Ella eventually agreed this had occurred, she also said that she hadn’t personally seen it happen. “My mom must have looked,” Ella explained. “Cause she told me who was doing it.”35 Ella did not go on to become a formal complainant in the district attorney’s case.
MacFarlane interviewed fourteen more children in the month of November, refining her interviewing technique as she went along. She began to refer to the microphone, which had piqued the curiosity of a number of children, as the “secret machine.” She told kids that if they were holding onto “yucky secrets” from their time at McMartin, revealing those secrets to the machine would make them go away. “We have to tell the secret machine the truth,” she told one boy.36 Her tone steadily changed as well. Whereas her questions for Ella Baldwin, though frequently repeated, were asked in a neutral and usually open-ended manner, interviews from later in the month featured a different approach. When some children said they hadn’t played a certain sexual game or that they hadn’t seen Ray remove anybody’s clothes, MacFarlane replied that a sibling or a friend from McMartin “told already.”37 When one five-year-old boy maintained that nobody had scared him into not talking about naked games being played at McMartin, even after MacFarlane tried this new approach, MacFarlane became very direct:
Q: Anybody ever tell you something bad would happen to you?
A: No.
Q: Anything bad happened to your mom and dad?
A: No.
Q: No?
A: No.
Q: Why don’t you want to tell me what happened at school?
A: Well somebody was going to hit me and I said don’t hit me. They sat on the bench. They said who cares I’m going to hit you.
(The boy appears to be talking about a playground confrontation with another child, who then got in trouble and was made to sit on a bench as a form of “time out.”)
Q: I think you’re scared to tell me about Mr. Ray.
A: I’m not scared.
Q: Why won’t you tell me?
A: I could go and tell my mom.
Q: Tell it in here. . . . Tell what happened to the other kids.
A: I don’t know.
Q: Did they get touched?
A: No.
Q: How about when you played the naked games, is that a secret?
A: No.
Q: That’s not a secret?
A: No, that’s a bad secret and we have to throw it away.
Q: Now we got rid of the bad secret.
A: Did all the secrets go away?
This last remark—did all the secrets go away?—is ambiguous. One possible interpretation is that the boy really was scared, despite his protestations, and that he was looking to MacFarlane for validation as he hesitantly unburdened himself. Another interpretation, though, is that he was asking MacFarlane, who was so insistent about the necessity of throwing away bad secrets, whether she was satisfied, whether the interview would now be allowed to end.
Q: Mr. Ray ever do anything bad?
A: I don’t know. How would I know?
Q: Did you know he ever did anything bad?
A: No.
Q: Ever see him do anything to the other kids?
A: I never saw it.
Q: Ever see his pee pee?
A: No. Who’s [sic] pee pee?
Q: Mr. Ray. . . . I wonder when you used to play the naked games with Mr. Ray and the other kids if anything else happened that might be bad. Other kids remember things and they told me you were there. So don’t you remember seeing some of that?
A: [Shakes head no.]
Q: You’re just afraid.
A: No I’m not.
Q: You’re just a scaredy cat. How come you won’t tell me?38
MacFarlane genuinely believed that someone had terrified the children into silence, but her approach in this interview borders on bullying, and it suggests a mounting frustration with her lack of success to that point. Only three of the children interviewed in November made sufficiently incriminating statements to eventually wind up on the official list of trial complainants. MacFarlane was convinced, however, that nearly all of the children interviewed that month had been abused. In her view and in the view of the police, the scope of the case was growing.
On the afternoon of November 30, Judy Johnson called Detective Hoag again. She said Matthew had revealed more details of his abuse and that McMartin teachers other than Ray had been involved. Babette Spitler, Johnson said, made Matthew vomit by stepping on his stomach, and there was a stranger, an old woman, who came to the school and held Matthew’s feet down while he was sodomized. Matthew had also been forced to perform oral sex on Peggy McMartin Buckey, the school’s administrator. According to Detective Hoag’s report on the call, Matthew also told his mother about “being taken to some type of a ranch far away where there were horses and he rode naked.” Ray took pills. Ray gave himself a shot. Ray killed a dog and put a cat “in hot water.”39
The December interviews did not go any better for MacFarlane or her CII colleagues. Of the eighteen children interviewed during that month, only two would end up on the criminal complaint filed by the district attorney in May of 1984, and neither of those children would appear at the eventual trial. This was not for lack of trying on MacFarlane’s part. She seemed to be less tolerant of the children’s unwillingness to provide details of abuse, and she abandoned many of her more open-ended lines of questioning, bringing up the “tie-up game” and the “naked movie star game” whether children mentioned it or not. She called a second child a “scaredy cat,” and when the girl still refused to say that she had been abused, MacFarlane brought in the girl’s mother to ask questions of her own.40 MacFarlane also appears to have stopped attending to the implications of the playful dynamic that she had encouraged in the first place, taking statements clearly made in the context of some imaginative game as straightfo
rward accusations of abuse. On December 9 her persistent efforts to elicit abuse stories from a boy named Jeremy Morse produced a semicomic sequence in which the two seemed to be playing three or four games at once, with no way to separate the boy’s flights of fancy from his memories. MacFarlane spent much of the interview asking who had photographed the children—CII workers had begun to suspect that child pornography had been produced at McMartin. The way she and Jeremy talk across one another in the transcript is like something out of Abbott and Costello:
Q: Here’s the camera. Now, who takes the pictures?
A: Him [indicating the plastic Ken doll].
Q: Who’s Him?
A: Who is he?
Q: I don’t know. Who used to take the pictures?
A: Miss Peggy.
Q: Miss Peggy took the pictures? . . .
A: He’s going to take the pictures.
Q: Mr. Snake? But who in your class took the pictures when you used to play?
A: Snake.41
The interview devolved into snake play for a time, as Jeremy fed the snake a length of string and then a pair of doll pants. The boy turned on a toy police car with a loud siren, and when MacFarlane tried to direct his attention back to the interview by asking whether he wanted to tell some secrets to the secret machine, Jeremy said, “I want to listen to that car.”42 The boy eventually seemed to claim that Ray had touched his penis, but then he offered a clarification: the “Jeremy” doll was actually Jeremy’s friend, Benjamin, and the Ray doll was Jeremy.43 Technically, Jeremy’s claim was that he had once touched Benjamin’s penis, but MacFarlane pressed on. Toward the end of the interview Jeremy used a toy syringe to strike the “Ray” doll’s penis. MacFarlane said, “That pee-pee touched a lot of people, didn’t it?”44 By the end of the month more than 30 children had been interviewed at CII. MacFarlane and her colleagues would eventually talk to some 375 more.