by Richard Beck
Alvin McCuan, the first of the group to be accused, received 268 years on 75 convictions. “You know,” he later said, “it sure does change your way of looking at the system.”18 The verdict form was 550 pages long, and the court clerk needed two and a half hours to read out its 345 separate decisions, which the jury had reached after less than two days of deliberation.19 A letter published in the Bakersfield Californian a month after the trial’s conclusion pointed out that, “assuming [the jurors] ate, slept and took potty breaks, that calculates out to approximately two minutes per verdict,” with each guilty verdict carrying an eight-year sentence.20 District Attorney Jagels, having obtained some of the longest prison sentences in California history, described the McCuan-Kniffen convictions as one of Bakersfield’s finest moments. Brenda Kniffen was sent to a unit that had been constructed to house the women accomplices of Charles Manson, and Scott Kniffen occasionally played chess with Sirhan Sirhan, who had shot and killed Robert Kennedy.21 With the hearing that sent the Kniffens and McCuans to prison, the initial stage of the Kern County sex ring investigation came to an end.
In Minnesota, Kathleen Morris never matched Ed Jagels’s single-minded passion for conviction and incarceration. To Jagels, criminal defendants represented a kind of crucial anti-constituency, a group deserving of nearly unlimited punishment and scorn. In order to make the punishment of criminals politically useful, however, the War on Crime–era prosecutor also needed to identify and mobilize victims, people whose lives dramatized the dangers of American society and the need for politically empowered prosecuting attorneys. Because she was the first female county attorney in Minnesota history, Morris attracted attention from the moment she took office, but it was as a fierce advocate for crime victims that Morris got herself onto insiders’ lists of potential candidates for statewide political office. Today many female political candidates know that in order to project toughness without alienating or threatening voters, it can be useful to talk and act like a mother determined to protect her children. This is exactly how Morris presented herself as her sex ring investigation swept through Jordan in 1983 and 1984, including in her choice of office décor. As her office interviewed dozens of children who police believed had been abused at wild parties, Morris began making photocopies of their little hands, palms down on the Xerox scanner. She arrayed these photocopies on the wall behind her desk, posing in front of the display when newspaper journalists came for interviews.22 The intent may not have matched the images’ effect, however, which is of many children reaching up to press against shut windows.
As in Bakersfield, the Scott County sex ring case began with relatively ordinary allegations. In September 1983 a twenty-five-year-old woman named Christine Brown called Jordan police and told them her children had been abused by a neighbor named James Rud. Police made an arrest, opened an investigation, and soon discovered that Rud already had two prior convictions for child sex abuse—one in Virginia, where he had been stationed during a brief period in the army, and one in Apple Valley, Minnesota, where he had moved following his “other than honorable” discharge.23 In Jordan, Rud lived in the Valley Green Trailer Court and worked as a trash collector.
Jordan was an old farming town that had also supported two breweries for many years. It sat on the south bank of the Minnesota River, and it was filled with stands of old, beautiful elm trees.24 Much of the town’s social life was organized around church. St. John’s Catholic Church and Wisconsin Synod, a Lutheran congregation where services had been held in German until World War II, were two of the community’s focal points.25 In the years leading up to Rud’s arrest, however, new residents began to arrive from nearby Minneapolis in intermittent waves, and some of the town’s inhabitants resented the idea that Jordan had been reduced to a big-city suburb. “Twenty years ago you’d know 95 percent of the people you saw on the street,” one local doctor told a reporter. “And you’d know them well. Now it might be 10 or 15 percent.”26 Nothing embodied these changes more clearly than the Valley Green trailer park, whose residents were transient and frequently poor or working class. The trailers were separated from downtown Jordan by State Highway 169, a road that split the town in half and had also been partially responsible for the recent influx of so many unfamiliar faces. For longtime Jordanites—or “Hubmen,” as they sometimes called themselves, after the local high school football team—Rud’s arrest confirmed suspicions they had been nursing for years. An older resident told a writer that the trailer park was built on ground that had previously been spread with “sludge”—human waste from the septic system. He said the ground was ideal for raising corn and that it should have stayed that way. “Valley Green is located on a pile of shit,” he said. “It’s just shit on shit.”27
Kathleen Morris took on the case in November 1983, by which point police investigators had more than they needed to win a conviction against Rud. For months Rud had taken advantage of his friendly rapport with local children and persuaded their parents to hire him as a babysitter. Children occasionally spent nights at Rud’s home, and police interviews, which were initially conducted with caution and skill, soon uncovered what had transpired in Rud’s trailer:
Q: OK, now do you know why you are down here?
A: Yes.
Q: OK, can you tell me about that incident, when this took place?
A: No.
Q: You can’t? Let me rephrase the question. I’ll ask you in a different way. Did a man touch you?
A: Yes.
Q: Did he touch you in personal areas of your body?
A: Yes.
Q: OK, when did this happen?
A: When I was staying with him.28
The child went on to provide Rud’s name and address, the date of her stay at Rud’s home, and a perfectly clear account of how she spent the afternoon, evening, and following morning in his company. Other children’s stories about meeting Rud in the game room of a local bowling alley, where he would supply them with quarters, were corroborated by Rud himself.29 More disturbingly, it seemed that in at least one case a child’s mother had known about Rud’s pedophilia, had even been in a home with Rud as he took her daughter off to a separate room, but had failed to stop or report any abuse—she and another parent were also arrested.30
Police continued to interview children, and before long they were using many of the same tactics that Kee MacFarlane would come to depend on in Los Angeles. “I don’t know,” one child said in response to an interviewer’s question about sexual games played at Rud’s house. “Did he take your underpants off?” the interviewer asked. “Can you say yes? Say yes.”31 Another boy claimed that when he once cut across Rud’s yard with some friends, Rud came outside, hit the boy on “the wiener,” said, “You’re gay,” and then walked back into his house and sat down in front of the television. Later, the boy said, Rud tore pages out of a stack of Playboy magazines, used scissors to remove the breasts and genitals from the pages, then jumped all over them. “He just went crazy,” the boy said. “He had a real funny laugh and he was going ‘Haaaaa haaaaa’ and stabbing these girls in the face and everything.”32 Five more people were arrested by the end of November, including two residents of the Valley Green trailer park, one of them the woman who had made the very first allegations against Rud. “We believe from the statements we’ve taken from all of the children so far involved,” said Police Chief Alvin Erickson, “that this thing goes back possibly two years.” A newspaper article claimed it was the biggest sex ring investigation in state history. The article also noted that all of the women involved were either divorced or separated from their husbands.33
“How did this happen?” Morris asked. “It happened because children who didn’t know better were told that they had wonderful, special and beautiful bodies, how sexy they were. And they kept quiet out of fear and threats.”34 Police now believed that Rud and his accomplices had abused at least thirty children, and as investigators conducted interviews in nearby
towns in search of additional victims, Jordan residents tried to patch up their deeply wounded feelings of small-town pride. Margaret Duke, a woman affectionately referred to as the “grandmother of the trailer court,” recalled friendly hordes of children banging on her door during previous Halloweens. This year’s crowd, however, was noticeably thin. “You’d expect something like this to happen in Minneapolis,” one woman said, “but not in a small little community like this.”35
Many residents worried that Jordan had some special flaw that had made Rud’s crimes possible, and in order to demonstrate to itself and to the world that this was not the case, Jordan committed every resource at its disposal to the fight against child abuse, including the town’s only computer. In December the Independent reported that “the Scott County computer has been reprogrammed to keep track of costs, victims, and defendants in the expanding investigation of the countywide sex abuse ring.” The county controller said the reprogramming had not been expensive—a pair of programmers took care of it over a weekend.36 This allocation of resources helped to reassure Jordanites, with the mayor even suggesting that it was really the town’s unique commitment to stopping child abuse (rather than the child abuse itself) that had caught the media’s eye. “A main reason that we have received so much public attention,” she wrote, “is that our law enforcement officials have been unusually diligent in their investigations and in seeing that those responsible are brought to trial and convicted.”37
Jordan also did its best to understand why the world had suddenly become such a dangerous place for children. “I see the real problem as the deterioration of families,” one woman wrote to the Independent. “The nation, right down to this small community, is sacrificing family life to better living standards.”38 Although most child abuse actually occurs within the private domain of family life, whether at the hands of immediate relatives or close family friends, many Americans believed then and believe today that child abusers are usually strangers, middle-aged men in old clothes hanging around bus stops and playgrounds. (A similar misconception sustains the popular image of the rapist as a stranger who drags women into alleyways. In reality the vast majority of rapists know their victims.) It was this belief, in part, that helped the Scott County sex ring case to grow to such enormous proportions. In November, as Jordan police arrested their eighth suspect and promised that more arrests would follow, Kathleen Morris explained that the Rud investigation had a much wider scope than her prosecution of the Cermaks. “The Cermaks abused children primarily in their own families,” the Independent reported. “In this case the abuse was primarily outside the family.”39 Rud menaced not just individual children but also an entire way of life. “Until we turn our priorities around and work on better and stronger family standards,” one resident wrote, “sexual abusers [and] pornography producers . . . will eat their way right through our communities.”40
In January 1984 police began to make arrests outside the Valley Green trailer park. Husband and wife Robert and Lois Bentz were arrested and charged with child sexual abuse, and then so were Greg Myers, a Jordan police officer, and his wife, Jane. Their son was eleven at the time, and he was immediately removed from his home, as were his two siblings. “They insisted that I was abused,” he later remembered. “They questioned me for, like, two hours that night.”41 The interrogations continued on an almost daily basis for three months, with therapy and foster care all seamlessly integrated into the process of criminal investigation. “We were asked to report any information to Kathleen Morris’s office,” said Susan Phipps-Yonas, a therapist who interviewed many of the children involved with the investigation.
Phipps-Yonas said that today psychiatrists understand that therapy and detective work have different goals and that it is important to clearly separate the two. “Those boundaries were just a mess back then,” she said. “We were being forensic interviewers, we were being expert witnesses. It was nuts.”42 As a result of these messy boundaries, Greg and Jane Myers’s son would not be allowed to see or communicate with his parents for a year and a half, and he said this is why he eventually began to fabricate stories of abuse. “I was just sick of being badgered,” he said. “I didn’t think, I mean, I was even going home. . . . I figured if this is going to be the way life is, I might as well make it a little more tolerable for myself.”43 He said his parents held orgies in the woods. By this point one local paper was reporting that the county was suffering from “a severe shortage of foster parents.”44 Arrests continued into the summer.
In Bakersfield, things were getting out of hand. In the wake of the McCuan and Kniffen convictions, new allegations of mass molestation exploded across Kern County. In Oildale, a suburban town just west of the Kern River Oil Field, a woman locked in an awful custody dispute became convinced that her stepchildren had been molested by their biological mother and stepfather. When the children said no such thing had happened, she beat them and denied them meals until they changed their stories, and then she called the police.45 Another man, John Stoll, was called back to court every few days for weeks and told at each hearing about a new child who had accused him of abuse. “Now it was a whole big passel,” he said. “Now there’s this whole giant molestery.”46
There were also more traditional pedophilia investigations, starting out with a single defendant and a small number of accusers, that grew to encompass entire neighborhoods. By 1985 police believed they had uncovered eight distinct molestation rings, and the county’s rate of arrest for sex crimes against children was twice the state average.47 SLAM and the Mothers of Bakersfield were joined by another parents’ group called Kids Are People Too, whose members protested outside the courthouse during Stoll’s trial. News footage shows a little boy, not more than four or five, who had been outfitted with a sign reading, “Help Me! Stop Child Molesters!” “The town was convinced,” John Stoll said, “that this herd of child molesters had just fallen out of the trees all at once.”48
Donny Youngblood, the county sheriff’s detective commander, later said that police did not go looking for these cases, that “they were thrust upon us.”49 But as the state attorney general’s office would eventually document, Youngblood’s remark, if sincerely meant, was very naïve. The following is an exchange that took place between a Kern County social worker and a suspect:
Q: You know when children, when children tell law enforcement or Child Protective services—
A: Uh huh.
Q: —about somebody, we believe children, okay.
A: Uh huh.
Q: Especially little, ah, would involve children but these are just, you know, four-, four-, five- and six-year-olds.
A: Uh huh.
Q: Okay, and they don’t have, they shouldn’t have knowledge of this stuff, they have a lot of knowledge, a lot of explicit details, knowledge, they say cream was being used . . . lotion.
A: Have you seen, you know, TV nowadays though, the parents let their kids watch?
Q: Okay, people often do accuse TV, but still children don’t fantasize about sexual abuse and they don’t implicate their own father.
A: Uh huh.
Q: Okay?
A: Uh huh. . . .
Q: Let alone themselves, especially when they’re, when they are feeling so badly about and they know it’s wrong.
A: Uh huh.
Q: Okay, it’s just they, some you know, if they aren’t gonna, if they’re mad at their dad and that’s when they may say physical abuse.
A: Uh huh.
Q: But, ah, they’re not gonna say sexual.
A: Uh huh.
Q: It just doesn’t happen.
A: Uh huh.
Q: So we, we do believe the children.
A: Uh huh.
Q: Okay, that you are involved.
A: Then no matter what I, what I say doesn’t even matter then?
Q: Well, yeah of course it matters, but, but our stand is that we believe t
he children.
A: Uh huh.
Q: At all cost, cause that’s our job and that’s, that’s what our belief is.50
As in Los Angeles, this belief was contingent on the child’s willingness to say that he or she had been abused. “I remember telling them no for about four hours,” one woman said, “and I was just tired. I wanted to go home, so I said what they wanted me to say.”51 Brian Kniffen remembered Andrew Gindes, the prosecutor who tried his parents’ case in court, bullying him into providing false testimony. “He would slam books down,” he said, “yell when we wouldn’t cooperate.”52 And a number of people retain vivid memories of one deputy sheriff in particular. According to Michael Snedeker, an attorney who represented a number of defendants in the Kern County sex ring cases, this deputy began whispering “hypnotic, graphic repetitions of sex acts” during one interview with a boy who could not recall being molested. A different mother called Jagels’s office to complain that the officer had slapped her daughter in the mouth when the girl refused to disclose abuse. That girl’s sister was subject to similar coercion. When she told the officer that her earlier allegations had been made up, he twisted the girl’s arm, told her, “You’re lying!” and then described “very detailed, filthy” sex acts. He didn’t let go of her arm until the girl retracted her retraction.53
In the 1970s feminist activists and writers had criticized the vulgar, pseudo-Freudian idea that children who accused adults of sexual abuse were only fantasizing. It was a valid criticism then and it remains so today that “deep down, she actually wanted it” is a direct descendent of “she’s just fantasizing.” But in the early 1980s the relationship between sex abuse allegations and fantasy underwent a strange inversion. Although a very small number of children seemed to relish the opportunity to tell awful, scary stories about people they knew, the adult accusers were the ones who fantasized Kern County’s sex rings into being. By the summer of 1984 the “Pitts” ring investigation, which began with a single disgruntled stepparent and a custody battle, had grown to include seven defendants, all accused of staging and filming weekly orgies with as many as thirteen children in a single ten-by-twelve-foot room. After a trial, during which prosecutor Andrew Gindes made repeated references to the Bible and told the jurors that Jesus Christ would believe the children’s allegations, all seven defendants were handed a combined prison sentence of more than twenty-five hundred years. When asked about these remarkably long prison terms, Judge Gary Friedman said the sentences fit the crimes. He said that he had personally seen photographs of the abuse—“every perversion imaginable.”54 But the photographs to which he referred were never produced. One assumes that if this definitive proof of the crimes actually existed, the prosecution would have made use of it at trial.