by Richard Beck
Chapter 3
Prosecutors
McMartin was part of a national phenomenon from the beginning. Two other cases involving alleged conspiracies to sexually abuse dozens of very young children—one in central California, the other just outside of Minneapolis—had got under way well before McMartin became a major news story. One of these cases even predated McMartin by more than a year. As the Los Angeles district attorney’s office worked to finalize charges against the McMartin teachers in the spring of 1984, a jury some 125 miles to the north, in the working-class oil and farm town of Bakersfield, delivered a verdict. Alvin and Debbie McCuan and Scott and Brenda Kniffen were all convicted of selling their children for sex in area motels and abusing them while the children hung from hooks in the ceiling. Their combined prison sentences totaled exactly one thousand years.
Around the same time, in a tiny Minnesota town called Jordan, a judge set trial dates for two other married couples who had been arrested and charged with abusing children between the ages of two and eleven during the previous summer. That brought to twenty-two the total number of people who had been arrested for similar crimes in Scott County over the previous few months.1 Detectives believed that two or maybe three organized child sex rings had been operating in secret for at least the previous year, throwing private parties during which games of hide-and-seek devolved into indiscriminate abuse. Jordan was a conservative, Christian community of about twenty-seven hundred people, a place reflexively described by both visiting national news reporters and its own inhabitants as “typically small-town U.S.A.”2 As the investigation widened, distressed residents wrote letters to Jordan’s local newspaper, the Independent. “The saddest part of all of this,” one wrote, “is the large amount of children that were abused while no one seemed to be aware of it! Are we all too busy with ourselves that we don’t have time to care?”3
In Bakersfield the district attorney who tried the case against the McCuans and the Kniffens owed both his career and the power of the office he occupied to his work on crimes against children. Ed Jagels was a combative but little-known Kern County prosecutor when police found fourteen-year-old Dana Butler’s body on a highway shoulder in April 1979. The girl had been stabbed forty times. An investigation quickly identified a man named Glenn Fitts as the obvious primary suspect—eyewitness testimony, blood samples recovered from Fitts’s carpet, and pubic hair recovered from Butler’s corpse all suggested as much. That Glenn Fitts regularly invited teenagers to his home and provided them with drugs and alcohol was also a fairly open secret in Bakersfield, at least among the teenagers. The problem was that Glenn Fitts was the former training coordinator of the Kern County Police Academy. For weeks the police officers who had trained at that academy failed to make an arrest, and in the wake of the scandal that followed, Kern County’s district attorney decided he would not seek reelection.4 Ed Jagels made corruption, which had nearly allowed Glenn Fitts to go free, and children, whom Kern County had failed to protect, the centerpieces of his campaign. He promised that under his supervision those who broke the law would be punished—every time. Speaking to a television news reporter, he said, “We’ve simply got to jail a lot more criminals for a lot longer.”5
Some eighteen hundred miles away, in Minnesota, Scott County had a passionate and charismatic prosecutor of its own. Kathleen Morris had taken a circuitous route to the law. She spent much of her time at Southern Illinois University playing pinochle in the student union, and then she moved to Champaign-Urbana to teach high school. She joined the Yippie Party and lived in a commune, where she didn’t mind the fact that she was the only employed person. “Everybody said you had to do your part to contribute,” she said, “and mine was to bring in money.”6 Then she left teaching, the commune, and the Yippies for Hamline University. As a law student, she appealed a misdemeanor case to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and by 1978 she was an assistant county attorney, prosecuting drug cases against high school students. In 1981 she attracted statewide attention for her work prosecuting six members of the Cermak family—two brothers, their elderly parents, and their wives—for sexually abusing a number of children, mostly their own. The brothers each received forty-year sentences, and Morris said the long prison terms handed down to the Cermaks created the false impression that her primary prosecutorial aim was revenge; her real focus was on obtaining psychological treatment for both the abusers and their child victims. Whether such treatment could be sufficient to protect children from those Morris prosecuted, however, was a different question. “I would like to just put a sign on their houses that says: ‘Pervert Lives Here,’” she said.7 By the time the Cermaks were sent to prison, Morris was thought to be one of the most promising political figures in the state. Journalists and attorneys thought she would eventually run for attorney general.
As Kern County district attorney, Ed Jagels demonstrated none of Morris’s interest in therapeutic rehabilitation for those who committed sex crimes against children. But like Morris, Jagels recognized and turned to his political advantage a growing perception among middle-class people that children were in desperate need of protection, that what most threatened children were sex crimes, and that the legal system, especially judges, made it harder for ordinary people to keep their children safe. This perception yoked together both the massive increase in attention paid to child abuse that had begun in the 1970s and a more general fear of crime that emerged in response to the protests and social disorder of the 1960s. Throughout his campaign Jagels received unwavering support from a group of parent-activists called the Mothers of Bakersfield. The group’s leader, Jill Haddad, had previously testified before Congress on the dangers of child pornography. One of the first prosecutors in the country to form an alliance with the crime-victims movement, Jagels attacked judges who granted early parole to violent offenders, chased an overly inquisitive news photographer up a courthouse staircase, and promised to put more power in the hands of the one legal figure who could truly be said to have an uncomplicated interest in protecting the public from criminals: the prosecutor.
Jagels kept his promises. He brought in staffers whose zeal for radical change matched his own, and his office’s aggressiveness, both in investigating cases and trying cases, earned Jagels frequent reprimands from judges. “The instances of misconduct are legion,” one panel of a state appeals court wrote of Jagels’s conduct during the prosecution of an armed robbery case.8 The appeals court only declined to throw out the conviction Jagels had obtained because there was so much evidence against the defendant, including clear testimony from two eyewitnesses. In other words, the defendant would have been convicted even without what the court described as Jagels’s “rantings, ravings, constant apologies, characterizations of defense counsel and defense counsel’s objections, personal attacks, allegations of impropriety, attacks on defense witnesses, improper questions, defiance of rulings, and the need for the court to continually admonish counsel.”9 Jagels had a boyish face, a very small mouth, and the kind of hair that politicians want to have. He seemed to enjoy confrontations with the media just as much as he had enjoyed confrontations with judges in his courtroom days. He was an extraordinarily effective reformer. Within a few years of his election, Kern County was imprisoning more people per capita than any other county in California, a state that already imprisoned more people per capita than any other state in the United States, a country with the largest prison system in the world.
That prosecutors could be reformers at all—much less prominent or effective ones—was, in the early 1980s, a relatively new feature of American politics. Beginning with the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and continuing through the 1970s, state legislatures and the US Congress passed hundreds of laws designed to shift legal power away from those accused of committing crimes and toward those who wanted the accused in prison: police officers, prosecutors, and victims. Through the middle of the twentieth century, the judge had been the representative figure of the A
merican legal system and also, to a certain extent, of American government as a whole. By virtue of the political neutrality of their offices, judges commanded deference inside the courtroom and public esteem outside of it. The Supreme Court’s series of landmark civil rights decisions in the 1950s and 1960s also suggested that the judiciary answered a high moral calling, that it was through judges that the country might manage to realize the promise of its Constitution.10
Beginning in the 1970s, however, the series of policy reforms comprising what is known today as the War on Crime permanently altered judges’ position within the legal system. Where the public had previously tended to see judges as impartial arbiters of the law, many—especially conservatives—now saw a group of unelected, unaccountable officials who frequently used their powers of discretion to let dangerous criminals off the hook. And if those powers of discretion were now a problem, the solution was to take them away from judges and hand them over to prosecutors. In the 1970s, for example, judges were the only officials with the power to determine whether a juvenile defendant would be tried as an adult. Today, in almost every state, that decision belongs to the prosecutor.11 The introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for those convicted in court further eroded the judiciary’s discretionary powers, making the prosecutor’s decision to bring charges—rather than the judge’s assessment of the circumstances surrounding the case—the key factor in determining the length of a convict’s prison term. These incremental shifts were soon reflected both in the country’s incarceration rates, which increased dramatically during the eighties, and more generally in the campaign promises and stump speeches of office seekers around the country. When mayoral, congressional, or presidential candidates describe themselves as “tough on crime,” they are trying to sound like prosecutors.
Ed Jagels became an early master of this kind of political rhetoric during his race for Kern County district attorney. His favorite campaign themes were the irresponsibility of the county’s judges and the threat they posed to public safety. At one debate, Jagels arranged for Jill Haddad to speak from the audience and accuse Jagels’s opponent, a Superior Court judge named Marvin Ferguson, of sending a four-year-old girl back to her abusive parents, who eventually killed her. Journalists later discovered that Ferguson was forced to send the girl home only because of the then–district attorney’s failure to actually send a prosecutor to the hearing, but this news came too late to be of any help to the judge.12 There was also the press conference at which Jagels, incensed over a California Supreme Court decision to strike down a law that would have allowed illegally obtained evidence to be presented in court, said, “If a couple of victims of these homicides wore appellate black robes instead of being gas station attendants and ranchers and jewelry store clerks, we’d start getting a little bit different decisions,” he said. “I guarantee that.”13
Jagels was still a few years away from the district attorney’s office in 1977 when a woman named Mary Ann Barbour began to worry about the safety of her step-grandchildren. Mary Ann’s life before her marriage to Gene Barbour had been eventful and fairly unhappy. Her father died in a road accident, and she had also once accidentally fallen out of a moving car, sustaining injuries that left a metal plate in her head. Her mother remarried twice after her father’s death, and she left home for good at the age of fourteen (the specific reasons for her departure are unclear). By the time she met Gene she had three children and two marriages behind her. Gene had two daughters of his own from a previous marriage. One of them was named Debbie, and when Debbie was twelve she left her mother’s home and said she wanted to live with her father. She said her stepfather, a man named Rod Phelps, had tried to molest her. Debbie got married to Alvin McCuan a few years later.
Debbie and Alvin had two daughters named Bobbie and Darla. Mary Ann was delighted with the girls, but between 1977 and 1980 she became increasingly convinced that Phelps was abusing Bobbie and Darla. She frequently examined the girls’ genitals, which she found to be red and swollen, and she insisted that Debbie stop leaving the children with Phelps. In January 1980, Mary Ann called a pediatrician to report that Bobbie had told another young relative about being molested by Phelps. The pediatrician examined Bobbie and came to the opinion that she had been sexually penetrated. A few days later, Gene Barbour told his wife about the allegations Debbie McCuan had made against Phelps when she was a teenager. Although Debbie eventually retracted those allegations, there is evidence that she too was worried for her daughter. In 1979 she asked a pediatrician to have a look at Bobbie’s “pubic area,” which was bruised. She told the doctor that Bobbie had fallen on a wire fence, but the doctor said this could not possibly explain the bruising.14 This revelation so upset Mary Ann that she left home for a few days before returning on January 14 at four in the morning. Gene called the sheriff’s department and said he was worried about Mary Ann—she hadn’t been sleeping, and she was also making threats. When the police arrived at the Barbour home that same day, Gene was restraining Mary Ann, there was a knife on the counter, and Gene said Mary Ann had threatened to kill him. According to the police officer who then spoke to Mary Ann, she appeared to be extremely paranoid—among other things, she said the Welfare Department was out to get her. Mary Ann was briefly hospitalized and given antipsychotics.15 A social worker named Velda Murillo was called in to interview Bobbie and her parents, and eventually Bobbie said that on one occasion Phelps had put his hand down her underwear and his finger in her vagina. Police tracked down Phelps for questioning. Alvin and Debbie, for their part, promised to keep Phelps away from their home and offered to put their daughters into therapy.
Soon after her hospital release, Barbour asked an acquaintance at the Welfare Department for help with getting Debbie McCuan’s day care license revoked, but a surprise inspection failed to uncover any problems. Barbour then made contact with Jill Haddad, who would be so instrumental to Ed Jagels’s political career. As the leader of an area chapter of the victims’ rights organization Stronger Legislation Against Molesters (SLAM), Haddad received copies of every sex-crime arrest report produced by the Kern County police, and she also drove the creation of a “sex abuse coordinator” position within the district attorney’s office. She gave Mary Ann both a friendly hearing and a means of accessing Kern County’s rapidly developing child sex abuse investigation machinery. In October 1981 Mary Ann told a probation officer that despite their earlier promises, Alvin and Debbie McCuan had allowed Rod Phelps to see their two daughters and that the abuse had started up again. After interviewing Bobbie and Darla again, Velda Murillo reported the girls had accused both Phelps and their father, Alvin McCuan, of molesting them. Alvin was arrested. At his preliminary hearing, the girls described being abused by their mother as well, so Debbie was arrested too. After a juvenile court proceeding, custody of the girls was handed over to Gene and Mary Ann Barbour in February 1982.16
To this point, Kern County police were dealing with a relatively ordinary investigation of intrafamilial abuse. That changed a few months after Mary Ann Barbour obtained custody of Bobbie and Darla. On April 2, Mary Ann met with Velda Murillo to report a number of shocking allegations the girls had allegedly furnished her with during the previous night. She said there were orgies, that the girls were having nightmares and were afraid of fire, that they had been made to watch snuff films and had seen another little girl killed right in front of them. She also said that Scott Kniffen and his wife, Brenda, had participated in the orgies. The Kniffens were family friends of the McCuans, getting together several times a year to catch up and play cards. In preparation for his trial, Alvin had asked Scott to testify on his behalf as a character witness. Scott later remembered that when police officers arrived to arrest him at work, he thought it was a prank, “like a singing telegram.”17 Scott and Brenda’s two sons were immediately placed in a juvenile home.
Child interviews were conducted in a special room, furnished with a box of toys and bowls of candy, in the Kern Coun
ty district attorney’s office. The Kniffen boys eventually corroborated Mary Ann’s allegations of motel orgies and wads of cash, but they failed to corroborate the part of the story where the cash was actually used to pay for things. Instead, one of the children elaborated the story to the point of implausibility, describing a scene in which six naked adults ran out into the parking lot, all of them clutching money in their fists—money that should have been handed over to Scott and Brenda Kniffen, according to the detectives’ working theory of the case. There is no evidence, however, that Kern County investigators were skeptical of any of these stories. The McCuans had suddenly gone from domestic sexual abusers to members of a county-wide network of sex rings.
In court, the prosecution presented testimony from Bruce Woodling, who would eventually do so much to shape Kee MacFarlane and Astrid Heger’s understanding of medical evidence and child abuse in Los Angeles. Woodling described his “wink response” test and testified that his examinations of the Kniffen boys had revealed proof of their abuse. The jury also heard from the Kniffens’ two sons, who, after eighteen months in foster care, said that their parents had handed them over to strangers in motels and that they had referred to those strangers as “customers.” In the spring of 1984, each of the four defendants received a prison sentence of at least 240 years.