We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  Morris told reporters that she had no idea why the jury had returned a “not guilty” verdict. “We still believe the kids,” she said. “I have to go tell the kids why adults don’t believe them. . . . [I’m] always surprised when people don’t believe children. . . . It’s about time people started to believe children.”79 She vowed to fight the Bentzes’ efforts to have their three children returned from foster care.

  Morris still had an additional twenty-one defendants awaiting trial. Donald and Cindy Buchan were scheduled to hear opening arguments in less than a month. When prosecutor Gehl Tucker actually rose to deliver her argument, however, she did not discuss the Buchans’ alleged crimes; instead, she announced that all charges against the married couple would be dropped. Later that day Morris’s office announced that all charges against all of the remaining sex ring defendants would be dropped as well. In place of criminal prosecution, she would use the family court system to try to keep the children away from their parents, all of whom Morris said she still believed were guilty.

  In a statement Morris explained this stunning development by claiming that the sex ring cases had been dropped for the greater investigative good. “The state had been ordered to release sensitive documents which relate to another ongoing criminal investigation,” she wrote—“an active criminal investigation of great magnitude.” Complying with these discovery motions, she wrote, “would have subjected the child witnesses to additional stress and trauma.” The best path forward, then, was to “[protect] the children from further involvement in criminal proceedings.”80

  As journalists soon revealed, these discovery motions had their roots in an exchange that had taken place between Earl Gray and a child witness during the Bentz trial. On the eighth day of the trial, a child recounting his sessions with the police mentioned that the detective asking questions had made handwritten notes throughout the interview. Despite having previously submitted requests for “any and all materials or information within the prosecutor’s possession . . . which is favorable to the defense,” the Bentzes’ attorneys had only received typed reports—never handwritten notes.81 Morris, a state commission would eventually find, still had these documents in her possession and had intentionally concealed them from defense attorneys. Like the contents of the fictitious John Doe file created by the Ritual Abuse Task Force out in Kern County, these handwritten notes made it clear that the investigation had lost touch with reality.

  In late 1983, nearly a year before the Bentz case went to trial, a ten-year-old boy told an investigator about a party at which children were whipped by women wearing “real dark mascara” and “see-through clothes.” “They just called everybody ‘honey child,’” the boy said of the adults in attendance. “They just were crazy.” He also described being pulled into a black limousine by James Rud and a man who “had millions of cameras.”82 A girl said she knew the pornographic films in which she had appeared were sold because “that’s where I got all my spending money.” She also said one defendant forced her to eat the intestines of a squirrel, a fox, and her pet gerbil along with a cat that was eaten “fur and all.” Other children said they had seen murders, the bodies wrapped in canvas, thrown into trucks, and driven away.83 Despite knowing perfectly well that such allegations, if made public, would be damaging to the prosecution’s case, a number of detectives and therapists were absolutely convinced the children were telling the truth. “I personally believe that this kid actually saw someone die,” one interviewer said, citing the level of detail in a child’s description of murder.

  Therapist Susan Phipps-Yonas, for her part, said that she did not credit the hypothesis being floated by some that the defendants may have only pretended to kill people as a means of frightening children into silence. Staging the corpse disposals in a convincing way, she said, would have been complicated.84 The terror they exhibited, she said, as well as the specificity of the dollar amounts being exchanged (“sometimes $1,000 or more”) indicated that kids had been scared by the real thing. She said that many therapists could not begin to understand the sheriff’s office’s reluctance to begin the search for bodies in and around Scott County. “The therapists involved have basically been raving, ‘Why not?’” she said. “We questioned very openly and directly why hasn’t there been the kind of search that would aid in locating bodies or in getting some kind of concrete evidence, given the fact that we have these accounts from several different children.”85 Phipps-Yonas eventually got her wish when Scott County deputies, disguised as fishermen, combed the banks of the Minnesota River in search of a gravesite. “We’re looking for dead bodies of kids,” one anonymous source said. “We may have gotten into this too deep.”86

  Soon after these allegations became public, Kathleen Morris handed control of the investigation over to Minnesota Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III, who released a report the following February announcing that a joint investigation conducted by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI had uncovered no evidence of homicides or of a Scott County–based child porn industry. No additional criminal charges would be filed. James Rud told the Minneapolis TV station WTCN that he had lied in implicating others in his crime, and a month later the two boys who had provided detectives with most of the tales of murder and bizarre group encounters in the woods also admitted their stories were false. Rud was sentenced to forty years in prison in January 1985.

  The Jordan Independent reported that despite some data entry irregularities, the county computer’s estimate of the total cost of the sex ring investigations had come to $251,266.87.87 And although the prospect of criminal prosecution was now gone for good, the havoc that Scott County had brought upon itself lingered in many ways. Civil suits filed against the county by a group of defendants worked their fruitless way through the court system for months, and family courts were similarly slow in returning the children to their homes. Shortly after recanting his allegations, an eleven-year-old boy who had spent eighteen months in foster care and been interviewed on at least seventy-four separate occasions, suffered a psychological collapse. He was hospitalized for six weeks. And although Roland Summit was correct in later noting that the boy said he was “desperately afraid of any contact with his parents,” it wasn’t because he feared abuse. “I didn’t want to go home then because, I mean, of all the stuff that was coming out of my mouth,” he said. “I figured I’d never be able to go home now. I mean I just called my parents everything from sexual abusers to murderers. I mean, it wasn’t real. It was like being in a movie, it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real at all.”88

  Other children found the investigation had upended their homes for good. Robert and Lois Bentz were divorced shortly after their acquittal. “We spent our 15th anniversary in court,” Lois said. “You can’t take it out on the judicial system, so you take it out on each other.”89

  “Sources have said that Morris acted as an investigator as well as county attorney,” the Star and Tribune reported as the investigation wound down, “that therapists acted like cops and cops acted like therapists, that social workers went along on a search warrant party.”90 In many communities prosecutors can exert a more direct and tangible influence on the textures and rhythms of people’s daily lives than any other government official. By expanding her office’s reach and blurring the lines that separated prosecution, law enforcement, and mental health services, Morris changed how Jordan’s residents thought about their community, their neighbors, and their children. Her office turned the helping professions into instruments of criminal investigation, and it also taught children and adults to scrutinize everyday interactions for subtle signs of trouble. At the height of the investigation, schools began to put on a new kind of presentation that tried to explain the difference between good (appropriate) and bad (abusive) kinds of touch. The Star and Tribune sent reporters to a nursery school to gauge the kids’ reactions:

  For example, [teacher Kathie Voss] says, “Sometimes moms have to clean us up when we get dirt
y.” She pulls out a drawing of a child being bathed. “What’s this?”

  “Bubbles!”

  “What’s happening to this person here?”

  “Drowning!”

  “No. This is a bathtub. Do moms and dads have a right to help us take a bath?” There are some yeses—and some no’s.

  “Of course they do. Do you like to take a bubble bath?”

  “Yes!”

  “You like to have mom help you?”

  “No!”

  “Oh, come on!”91

  The presentation was titled “Touch,” and it told children that it was usually okay to be tackled while playing football—so long as you were a boy—and usually not okay to be hugged by an adult who wasn’t also a relative. Although the students had trouble parsing some of the surprisingly fine distinctions separating good touches from bad ones, one may assume that parents, the presentation’s true intended audience, got the message just fine.

  Chapter 4

  McMartin—The Preliminary Hearing

  More than four hundred children had been interviewed at Children’s Institute International by the end of 1984. Only forty-one would be named as complainants on the district attorney’s charging documents, and only thirteen would testify at the preliminary hearing. Most people involved with the prosecution’s side of the case, however, clearly believed that hundreds of children had been abused at McMartin, no matter what it said on the charging documents. Those hundreds of children had parents, and in the spring of 1984 many of them began to organize.

  Nearly a year after Judy Johnson first called the police, the investigation was moving along at a slow pace, and parents looking to work off anger and nervous energy wanted to know how they could pitch in. The district attorney’s office furnished them with a list of forty locations to which children said they had been taken. “We’re out here playing Dick Tracy,” one father told the Los Angeles Times. Parents met up to form search parties, piling into cars with kids in the back and driving around town, hoping some storefront or bungalow would ring a bell. They wondered why no suspects beyond the original seven had yet been arrested. They shared information among themselves and with detectives. They took down suspicious license plate numbers outside restaurants and went through people’s garbage.1

  One of the parents was a real estate broker named Bob Currie. His children attended McMartin between 1972 and 1981, and when the abuse allegations first surfaced, Currie and his wife sent these children to Kee MacFarlane. The two sons apparently did not make allegations that were sufficiently credible for the DA to list them as complainants, but then none of the parents most actively involved in independently investigating McMartin, with the exception of Judy Johnson, were ever formally involved with the case. Whether Currie’s exclusion from the legal proceedings caused him to look for alternative means of involvement is unclear, but a legal proceeding is only one part of what happens to a community during a criminal investigation. McMartin gave Currie a reason to change his whole life.

  Currie provided photographs of buildings, suspects, and license plates to the FBI. He coordinated drive-arounds and other little reconnaissance missions. By late 1984 he was contacting the police with regular updates on his progress. He said children had been taken to a street called Sorrel Lane in Palos Verdes. He couldn’t be sure of the exact address at which abuses had occurred on that street, but it was either 7, 9, 18, or 20. He said his son had been taken to a farm in a “very clean restored Ford Mustang convertible.” He believed that Ray coordinated some of his activities from out of state, so he called the park rangers at Mount Rushmore to determine whether the Buckeys had any kind of ranch or compound nearby. When children described being flown out of Los Angeles in a six-passenger airplane, Currie conducted a stakeout at Hawthorne Airport and took down airplane registration numbers. Ten miles to the south, at Torrance Airport, Currie observed the comings and goings of pilots. He noted one in particular: “a female pilot who may be a lesbian.”2

  Not all parents associated with the McMartin case subscribed to these conspiracy theories, nor did all of them even believe that any molestation had occurred at the preschool. Some people sent their children to Children’s Institute International, listened as Kee MacFarlane described the secrets she had uncovered, decided that what MacFarlane described made no sense, and stopped returning investigators’ phone calls. These parents largely kept their heads down during the investigation’s early stages. Their silence would go totally unnoticed in noisy Manhattan Beach, especially given the amount of attention drawn by Bob Currie. In March 1985 he led a group of parents to the McMartin Preschool grounds. For months stories had circulated about teachers slaughtering classroom pets—rabbits, birds, cats—as a means of frightening the children into silence. Hoping to corroborate these stories with physical evidence, Currie brought in a backhoe to excavate a vacant lot next to the school. When the backhoe didn’t find anything, parents used shovels. By Saturday afternoon some fifty parents (with twenty children in tow) were pitching in, milling around, catching up. Then somebody found a turtle shell in the ground. “We didn’t touch anything,” Currie’s wife said to a journalist who arrived to report on the dig.3 Investigators then took a more professional look at the lot. Their team of expert surveyors was unable to locate any “trapdoors, tunnels, subterranean rooms, or hidden doors.”4

  A career in local real estate does not usually provide many opportunities for camera time, but Currie discovered and then tapped into an immense talent for media provocation. When asked what he thought of people who refused to believe that child molestation could be so widespread and violent, Currie said, “The soldiers who went to Auschwitz didn’t expect to find six million dead, either.”5 In 1985 Currie was arrested for illegal possession of a loaded weapon in a public place. He had followed one of his leads to Pico Rivera in East Los Angeles, and of the gun, which he had borrowed from another activist parent named Jackie McGauley, he said, “It’s better to have [a weapon] with you than not to have it with you sometimes.”6 Currie paid his $1,000 bail and went home. Some people were put off by these press conferences and other performances. One columnist was at pains to point out that Currie’s group had “been dismissed as cranks and fanatics by police officials and most of the media.”7 But calling someone a crank is not the same as not paying attention to him. Journalists could dismiss Currie even when they shared his belief that mass-molestation had been concealed for years at McMartin, as though a small subset of mediagenic extremists was needed to reassure those in the panicked mainstream of their moderate, rational thoughtfulness.

  One possible motivation for these bursts of activity was the parents’ desire to atone for what they now saw as previous failures to protect their children. Parents in Manhattan Beach had to deal with the normal feelings of concern and grief that would obviously accompany the news that a crime had been committed against one’s child, but these feelings were compounded by the fact that the abuse was said to have taken place for such a long period of time. “The last thing in the world I would have ever dreamed of is child abuse,” said John Cioffi, a McMartin parent who was also a member of the Hermosa Beach City Council.8 He and many other parents wondered how they could have failed to see what was going on, and some people felt that if the crimes really were as elaborate as the DA said, parental negligence was the only plausible explanation. “To me the parents aren’t listening,” said one school director, and another preschool owner agreed that neglect was “the only way that I could see it could have happened.”9 But it wasn’t only feelings of guilt that had Bob Currie reporting potential lesbians at airports. The investigation energized him and many others whose children had attended McMartin. The case offered mothers who spent their days socializing and tending to their homes an opportunity for personal and political transformation, a chance to become fiery activists. Of Cioffi, who was already engaged in a political career as city councilman, the case demanded swift, decisive act
ion in a time of crisis.

  More generally, McMartin lent a sort of heroic glow to the very idea of parenting. Worries about the anomie and selfishness of upper-middle-class Americans were a staple of Sunday newspaper editorials during the early eighties, and Manhattan Beach was an affluent place with its share of boredom and restlessness. McMartin reimagined life there as a battle to preserve that peaceful, comfortable way of life. The local chapter of Society’s League Against Molestation mobilized its flood of new members to put on abuse prevention workshops around the area. A mother launched a campaign that included support for mandatory sentencing minimums, public awareness campaigns, and a victims assistance telephone hotline run out of her home. A Los Angeles Times article that described the campaign mentioned three different kinds of abusers: the McMartin teachers, a sexual psychopath who had been sent to death row in San Quentin, and “male babysitters,” who were to be avoided in favor of their female counterparts if at all possible. The article did not mention family members—statistically the most frequent perpetrators of child abuse—except to laud parents’ efforts to bring abuse to an end. In Los Angeles parents saw themselves as the only thing standing between their children and sexual peril. “We have learned that there is no such thing as too much parental love and reassurance,” the mother said, “to a child who has been molested.”10