We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  A: If I forget something like—or maybe I accidentally said the wrong thing.

  Q: What would make you think that you could have said the wrong thing?

  A: Some—

  Q: You told the truth, didn’t you?

  A: Well, some of the things—I wasn’t sure.60

  Four months into the investigation there was also evidence that the churches, grocery stores, and private homes of Manhattan Beach were fertile grounds for rumor and speculation. From almost the very beginning children interviewed at CII had occasionally mentioned learning about Ray’s crimes from their parents. Now, at the beginning of the new year, the stories children provided to Kee MacFarlane became more surreal. One boy said that Peggy Buckey was the teacher behind the naked horsey game, that she would mount her students and ride them around in the nude.61 He denied that Ray was involved in the abuse, but he said that Virginia McMartin had killed animals at the school. Because police detectives do not hire stenographers to monitor every potential witness and suspect at home, it is impossible to know exactly who spread which rumor, who heard a story and added a detail of their own before passing it along, who misheard something over the telephone. But the way the stories told at CII intensified over time suggests that the extreme length of the investigation was crucial in shaping the case. By the end of the process, children coming in to talk to MacFarlane had spent nearly a year living among neighbors, friends, and parents convinced that Manhattan Beach harbored a secret evil. In January the boy who accused Virginia of killing classroom pets also told MacFarlane that teachers had taken the children off school grounds for abuse in various locations. He said he had been put in a car and gone to a hotel, a car wash, and a church. When the district attorney filed a criminal complaint three months later, that boy’s name was included.

  Sixty-three children spoke with Kee MacFarlane or her assistants during the first three months of interviews at CII. When an investigative journalist with the local ABC affiliate finally broke the story on February 2, he reported that “at least” sixty children had been identified as victims.

  Wayne Satz learned about McMartin early on from a KABC colleague whose children had been involved with the investigation. He spent months gathering information—almost half a year after Judy Johnson’s first call to the police, not a single news report on the case had been published or aired. Satz took special care during the fall and winter to cultivate Kee MacFarlane, who became his most important source and eventually his girlfriend. He had a long nose and brown hair, and he spoke with a soft and slightly thin voice. He wore tan jackets on camera, and he worked at the tail end of the period when men could wear facial hair—in his case a full beard—on television. “Scores of children from the McMartin school,” he said in his first report, “boys and girls, have now reportedly told [Kee MacFarlane] that they had been taken to locations away from the school and been filmed, presumably for sale as kiddy porn, and had been sexually abused, repeatedly, and in every imaginable way.”62 He was always careful to say the word “alleged” before he said “crimes,” “victims,” or “abuse,” and yet his stories left no doubt—the only question was how many victims the police would eventually turn up and how many adults would eventually be charged. “I don’t think the depth of terror that can be put into a child should be underestimated,” MacFarlane told Satz. “In my thirteen years of working in this field, I’ve never seen a situation that compares with this one.”

  Satz broke the McMartin story before District Attorney Philibosian took the case to a grand jury, before the grand jury returned an indictment, and even before Philibosian announced its existence. With six weeks to go before the grand jury began to consider the case, other journalists scrambled, unsuccessfully, to catch up to KABC. Satz had his sources—and the story—all to himself.

  In his initial report Satz said that in addition to the testimonial evidence being gathered at CII, a Ventura doctor had found medical evidence of abuse. “Dr. Bruce Woodling is a specialist in finding the sometimes subtle signs that a child has been molested,” Satz said. “And he is said to have made positive findings after examining these preschool children.”63 If true, this would have been a major coup for the district attorney. Law enforcement had long struggled with the fact that although rape and other violent forms of sexual assault produced physical evidence, chronic forms of nonviolent abuse did not; a parent could fondle a child repeatedly without leaving any marks.

  Bruce Woodling had spent the better part of his career trying to help prosecutors find a way around this problem. He graduated from the medical school at the University of Southern California in 1972, and it was shortly after he settled at the county hospital in Ventura that he received a call from the Los Angeles district attorney’s office. The DA asked whether he would be interested in doing on-call work examining rape victims. Woodling took to the job, which paid very little, with enthusiasm and a sense of purpose, and before long he was known around Southern California as a sex crimes expert. By the middle of the decade he was looking for ways to find medical evidence of chronic abuse in children.

  His eventual findings had two parts, both variations on the idea that physicians needed to examine suspected abuse victims more closely than had been previously done. First, as Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker have explained in their book on the child care sex abuse panic, Woodling revived a set of Victorian theories about the physical consequences of gay sex and adapted them to children. Nineteenth-century physicians had looked hard for ways to identify homosexuals in court, and one popular belief had it that if a physician began to perform a rectal examination on a patient who regularly engaged in sodomy, the anus would spontaneously open up, whereas normal anuses would tighten. Although this theory had been discredited by the time Bruce Woodling entered medical school, many physicians continued to believe in it, and Woodling saw no reason why it shouldn’t hold true for children as well. During exams he began using a swab to touch a spot near the young patient’s anus. If it opened, he concluded that the child had been sodomized.64 The wider the opening, the more regular the abuse had been. Woodling called this the “wink response” test.

  Woodling’s second innovation in child sex abuse forensics was technological. Around the time that Woodling published his wink response findings, an article in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology began to publicize a new examination instrument called the colposcope. This was essentially a magnifying device that could be hooked up to a film or video camera, and it had recently been introduced to forensic exams in Brazil as a means of conducting virginity checks (legally a woman could only be raped in Brazil if she had never previously had sex).65 Woodling acquired a colposcope and began using it to examine children, and he soon developed a vocabulary to describe the things the instrument allowed him to see. Blood vessels, miniscule abrasions, and tiny variations in the size and shape of a girl’s hymen were suddenly visible, and Woodling’s reports quickly filled with words like “microtrauma,” meaning a wound that only the colposcope could see, and “synechiae,” meaning scar tissue. Woodling also adopted the now-discredited idea that any hymenal opening greater than four millimeters is a marker of sexual trauma. The adoption of this last notion more or less completed the theory of sexual abuse forensics that would come to dominate the McMartin investigation.

  At Children’s Institute International, forensic interviews with McMartin students were usually followed by medical exams. Although Woodling did not personally conduct the majority of CII’s medical exams, he trained Astrid Heger, who did.

  Astrid Heger joined CII in 1983. She had nearly a decade’s worth of experience in pediatrics but little experience examining victims of sexual assault, so she called Woodling, whose work she had followed for a number of years, and asked him to give her a course in forensic examination. She absorbed Woodling’s theories about microtraumas and the four-millimeter hymen, and she acquired a colposcope. When she first began examining McMartin
children at CII, she had conducted fewer than a dozen examinations of repeatedly abused children, most of which had been conducted with the supervision of a more experienced colleague.66 The results of her McMartin exams validated the conclusions drawn from Kee MacFarlane’s interviews: Heger concluded that 80 percent of the 150 children she saw had been abused.67 Many of these diagnoses were based on Woodling’s microscopic abrasions and hymenal variations, but Heger also diagnosed sexual abuse where she herself had found no positive evidence of it. This was based on the conviction—one she shared with Roland Summit—that medical professionals had a special social role to play in bringing the problem of child abuse out of the shadows.

  Instead of clarifying or challenging the claims elicited in Kee MacFarlane’s interviews, her reports validated them. Even perfectly normal physical findings were sometimes described as “consistent with history of sexual abuse.”68 Because abuse often fails to scar or mark the victim in any medically detectable way, this is technically true. But another feature of this language would certainly seem to be its helpfulness to prosecutors. Shortly after the McMartin examinations, Heger appeared in an instructional, “how-to” video on conducting forensic abuse exams. In the video, Heger talked about the importance of keeping the courtroom in mind while performing an exam: “[the medical record] should be prepared with the thought that it may become part of the legal proceeding,” she said.69 She also said that “the recognition of sexual molestation in a child is entirely dependent on the individual’s inherent willingness to entertain the possibility that the condition may exist.” At CII Heger seems to have taken this idea to its logical extreme and concluded that the social recognition of child abuse was also dependent on the individual’s refusal to entertain the possibility that abuse had not occurred. Neither Heger nor her mentor, Bruce Woodling, whose “wink response” paper was coauthored with an employee of the district attorney’s office, appears to have worried too much about the effects such a close alliance with prosecutors might have had on their work. Heger simultaneously acted as a pediatrician and as a police detective with a white lab coat.

  CII billed the state of California $455 for each interview and medical examination, and these continued into the spring of 1984.70 Like MacFarlane, Astrid Heger sometimes refused to take no for an answer from patients who would not provide a medical history that included sexual abuse. “I don’t want to hear any more ‘no’s,’” Heger told one girl who had refused to disclose. “Every little boy and girl in the whole school got touched like that.”71 By this point investigators believed that almost every teacher in the school had been involved as well. Judy Johnson was still making regular calls to the Manhattan Beach police, reporting what she claimed were allegations made by her son, Matthew, who was now three years old. The police reports that document these calls, however, suggest either that Judy was dutifully and neutrally reporting her son’s increasingly surreal allegations, or that her mental health was deteriorating:

  Matthew feels that he left L.A. International in an airplane and flew to Palm Springs. . . . Matthew went to the armory. . . . The goatman was there . . . it was a ritual type atmosphere. . . . At the church, Peggy drilled a child under the arms, armpits. Atmosphere was that of magic arts. Ray flew in the air. . . . Peggy, Babs and Betty were all dressed up as witches. The person who buried Matthew is Miss Betty. There were no holes in the coffin. Babs went with him on a train with an older girl where he was hurt by men in suits. Ray waved goodbye. . . . Peggy gave Matthew an enema. . . . Staples were put in Matthew’s ears, his nipples, and his tongue. Babs put scissors in his eyes. . . . She chopped up animals. . . . Matthew was hurt by a lion. An elephant played . . . a goat climbed up higher and higher and higher, then a bad man threw it down the stairs. . . . Lots of candles were there, they were all black. . . . Ray pricked his right pointer finger . . . put it in the goat’s anus. . . . Old grandma played the piano . . . head was chopped off and the brains were burned. . . . Peggy had a scissors in the church and she cut Matthew’s hair. Matthew had to drink the baby’s blood. Ray wanted Matthew’s spit.72

  The Manhattan Beach police do not seem to have dismissed these claims entirely. They may not have gone looking specifically for goat men or decapitated infants, but by March detectives believed that the case involved not only teachers at McMartin but other adults in the area as well, and they executed search warrants on eleven residences across the South Bay. The month saw a frenzy of activity. CII held regular meetings with the McMartin children’s parents to bring them up to date on new developments. Over the course of two weeks, a Los Angeles grand jury—the one whose existence had been revealed by Wayne Satz at KABC—heard testimony from eighteen children who had been interviewed at CII. After hearing this testimony, the grand jury filed a 105-count indictment against five McMartin teachers: Ray Buckey, Peggy McMartin Buckey, Peggy Ann Buckey, Betty Raidor, and Babette Spitler. In a phone interview broadcast on KABC, Virginia McMartin angrily cut off an interviewer who asked whether she thought her grandson had ever had any sexual contact with children. “I certainly do not think that my grandson has one thing wrong with him,” she said. “He is a very fine young man with a natural understanding of children.”

  “So you think you’re just being framed, huh?” the reporter said.

  “You’re darn tootin’ I think we’re being framed,” Virginia replied. “I don’t think it, I know it!”73 Virginia would soon be jailed herself. So would Mary Ann Jackson, who taught at the preschool.

  Around this time, Ray hired a lawyer named Danny Davis as his new defense attorney. Davis first met the McMartin-Buckeys in the offices of Don Kelly, who had taken a small retainer before deciding he wanted nothing to do with the rapidly and ominously expanding case. When Davis received Kelly’s phone call, he was in his backyard in west Los Angeles planning a vacation with his girlfriend. Davis had spent much of the previous five years defending young, wealthy Americans with “boutique” drug operations, and his most recent defense, of a pilot caught with six hundred kilos of cocaine, had gone very well. “It was a big success,” Davis said. “Everybody was very happy with what happened.” Davis had never handled any kind of molestation case before, but he had heard a little bit about the McMartin investigation, and the kinds of drug cases he liked best were becoming rare; larger, organized cartels were pushing smaller operations out of business. He drove over to Kelly’s office “with ‘yes’ already on [his] lips,” and then he saw the McMartin-Buckeys and decided that what he saw lined up with what he had heard on the news. “They had those hard-boned, chiseled, criminal-looking features,” he said. “Not knowing whether or not they did it, I acted on my experience and presumed they did.” Unlike prosecutors, who theoretically do not expect to bring charges against any defendant who is innocent, criminal defense attorneys are very open about the fact that many of the people they represent really have committed crimes. “My line is, there’s never been a long line of innocent people waiting outside my office,” Davis said.74 As Davis began to plan a defense with his new client, the other six McMartin defendants sought out lawyers of their own.

  One night in early April, someone jumped the fence surrounding the McMartin Preschool and lit the building on fire. The blaze caused around $10,000 worth of damage, and as the arsonist left the grounds, he or she spray-painted a message on one of the school’s stucco walls: “ONLY THE BEGINNING.” The story made local papers like the Easy Reader and Daily Breeze and also the Los Angeles Times. With the grand jury’s indictment formally released, with a prosecutor named Lael Rubin assigned to head the state’s case, and with the district attorney himself, Robert Philibosian, making a highly unusual appearance in court seated at the end of the prosecutors’ table, McMartin was now front-page news all over the city.

  In addition to the horrible news coming out of Manhattan Beach, these reports described a city with growing doubts about the safety of day care in general. “A child abuser,” one Times article said, “intimidates the
child to keep it a secret.”75 Efforts to crack down on unlicensed preschools and child care centers had been under way since the beginning of the decade, but even a license, another article said, was “no safety guarantee,” and social services representatives claimed that abusers were often smart enough to evade detection for long periods of time. “You are not going to find out about abuse by visiting,” one director of community care licensing told the Times. “Most have enough sense to stop beating or molesting children when we arrive.”76 McMartin was held up as a perfect example of social services’ helplessness in the face of such a threat. “They’re administering day care centers as if they were Burger Kings,” one McMartin parent said of the state’s licensing agencies. “They’re measuring square footage and doorway widths, counting teachers and checking the sliding boards for splinters while our children are being molested.”77

  Turning to law enforcement, it seemed, was the best hope for protecting the city’s children. All around Los Angeles, parents began to call the cops. In May the Peninsula Montessori School, less than ten miles down Pacific Highway 1 from Manhattan Beach, was closed as a result of child molestation allegations. In late July police executed a search warrant for the Manhattan Ranch Preschool in Manhattan Beach. The Children’s Path Preschool in Hermosa Beach closed in October, and the Learning Game Preschool followed in December. By that point Michael Ruby, a seventeen-year-old who had previously worked at Manhattan Ranch, was on trial. The preschool run out of St. Cross Episcopal Church shut down the following spring. Teachers who worked at preschools that did manage to stay open noticed that parents were reluctant to leave their children at a day care that employed men. “McMartin’s was the place—it was the cliquey little place,” said a dental assistant who had given lectures on hygiene at McMartin. She hadn’t noticed anything suspicious. “How could we have been so blind?” she said.78