by Richard Beck
Though not everyone agreed with Bob Currie’s ideas about the complexity and reach of the McMartin conspiracy, parents were soon entertaining some pretty unlikely scenarios. Therapists at CII elicited stories involving strangers and camera equipment out of the children they interviewed, so in November 1984 parents and their allies formed a group called Parents Against Child Abuse (PACA), and at its first press conference the group announced a $10,000 reward for “any verifiable piece of child pornography involving any child who attended the McMartin Preschool that will lead to the conviction of the seven defendants presently charged in this case.”11 The wave of nursery school and day care closings that swept over the area in 1984 also bolstered the idea that McMartin was not some isolated aberration. PACA members told reporters they believed that as many as two hundred other adult abusers remained to be discovered.
These claims only differed in degree—not in kind—from those made by official investigators. One judge made a blunder during an early hearing and publicly announced that police detectives had a list of thirty uncharged suspects in the case. Thirty isn’t three hundred, of course, but both numbers suggest a fairly elaborate plot.12 PACA’s child pornography reward also seems less quixotic in light of the fact that investigators had already raided a local photography shop in search of incriminating evidence and flown to a national park in South Dakota that employed Peggy Ann Buckey during the summer of 1983. They thought Ray might have hidden child porn somewhere in the park when he flew out to visit his sister.
In 1984 a number of parents filed civil lawsuits against the police for their alleged mismanagement of the case. They wanted to do something that would finally goad the MBPD into accelerating the investigation or bringing in some extra help. They succeeded. Police contacted the FBI’s Los Angeles office, and for a few weeks federal investigators went door-to-door, interviewing people involved with the case. Police were confident that the kinds of hard physical evidence they so badly needed would soon surface. FBI agents spoke to a former teaching assistant at McMartin who remembered finding it odd that Ray never talked about dating any women. She said that she had been to Ray’s house and that Ray had a weird “pyramid structure” hanging over his bed.13 They talked to parents who remembered that Ray had been arrested for drunk driving several years ago and that soon afterward his mother had made him get some kind of counseling from a local pastor (Peggy McMartin Buckey was raised as a devout Christian Scientist and remained religious as an adult).14 Maybe that counseling was for something more disturbing than a few nights of heavy drinking.15
When Judy Johnson spoke to the FBI, she made it clear just how concerted an effort parents were making to expand the parameters of the case. “She is in contact with various parents,” the FBI investigator noted in his report, “and those parents have very specific information concerning elaborate photographic equipment used to photograph their children.” Johnson told her interviewers she had strong evidence that children had been taken “out of state into the Las Vegas, Nevada area and/or the Palm Springs area.”16 (Probably without knowing it, Johnson joined a long tradition of conspiracy theorizing here by only alluding to this evidence rather than producing it.) Reading Johnson’s FBI statements, it is apparent that the investigation was taking a toll on her mental health. She said her other child had also been molested, years earlier, at a different preschool.
In Los Angeles the parents worked to influence the course of the McMartin case in particular, but in Sacramento they began to push for legislation that could influence cases throughout the state. They knew that their children would soon be called to testify against their former teachers in court, and they believed this experience would retraumatize kids who were already dealing with severe psychological damage. Standing between the parents and a solution to this problem was the confrontation clause of the Sixth Amendment, which stipulates that criminal defendants have the right to hear testimony against them in person, face-to-face. Parents hoped to carve out an exception that would allow children under the age of fourteen to testify from outside the courtroom via closed-circuit television. They worked with a state senator named Art Torres to craft SB46 and shepherd it through the legislature. The bill, Torres said, would not trample on the Constitution; all he wanted was to equip the legal system with “contemporary” tools. The Founding Fathers, after all, could never have “envisioned child molestation as epidemic as it is today.”17
The Senate passed the bill by a 28–8 vote in February 1985, and when the gavel came down on the final vote, parents who made the trip up from Los Angeles hugged and cheered in the back of the chamber. Other bills were passed by the end of the summer, all of them transferring power from defense attorneys to prosecutors in the name of protecting traumatized children. Child abusers who killed their victims became eligible for the death penalty. In cases where a child was under the age of eight, hearsay evidence could be admitted in court, allowing parents to tell juries what their children had told them about what the abusers allegedly did. For children under the age of sixteen, pretrial testimony could be videotaped and shown in court so that the actual child did not have to make an appearance. These last three measures were all part of a single bill that sailed through the State Senate without debate and with unanimous approval.18
That taking the stand was traumatic to children was more an article of faith than a documented fact among therapists and parents. For journalists who actually covered the McMartin preliminary hearing and other day care sex abuse trials in the Los Angeles area, the experiences of child witnesses did not seem to be so one-dimensional. A girl who cried when asked to describe her “private parts” might take a long break, return, and then smilingly claim that her day care teacher had been standing “on his head, probably” when he subjected her to oral sex.19 Another might provide vivid testimony and then immediately admit on cross-examination that nothing had happened at all. Another might seem to be not so much terrified as bored.20
But when Lael Rubin, the prosecutor who would soon be trying the McMartin case, flew to Washington and testified before a US Senate subcommittee, she said that “the Sixth Amendment right does not grant constitutional status to the defendant being able to intimidate any witness by his physical presence.”21 If children failed to seem traumatized on the stand, it was then only a matter of waiting for the inevitable psychological consequences to make themselves known. “It’s not clear why these kids are not exhibiting symptoms,” Roland Summit said of a few children who testified without apparent difficulty at the McMartin preliminary hearing, “[but] going to court to testify in a child molestation case is a no-win situation. You’re exposed, you’re denuded by it.”22
A preliminary hearing is conducted before a judge, and it is not designed to determine actual innocence or guilt. The prosecution’s goal is simply to prove that its charges carry sufficient weight to merit the consideration of a full trial. In many criminal cases the preliminary hearing is little more than a judicial formality. The McMartin prelim began on August 7, 1984, and everyone expected it to be brief. Few people in California had ever heard of one running longer than a couple of months.
Like the investigation that preceded it, however, the McMartin preliminary hearing often barely seemed to be moving forward at all. Part of this was due to SB46, which introduced a number of complications and delays, but most of it was by design. The McMartin prelim moved slowly because that’s how Ray Buckey’s lawyer wanted it.
Danny Davis had a home-brewed theory of social panic on which he based many of his decisions about strategy. The theory divided a panic into different stages. The first stage, “social event,” referred to the set of conditions or circumstances that made the panic possible. Davis believed that McMartin had been precipitated by affluent baby-boomers’ feelings of guilt about their soft lifestyles and lazy parenting habits. In the second stage, “scapegoating,” society looked to shift blame away from those who really deserved it. Ray Buckey was the scapegoat. Fi
nally, Davis said, after lots of destructive energy had been expended trying to punish the scapegoat, you reached a phase called “shameful retrospect,” in which people realized their mistake and then wished they had not acted so recklessly.23 Davis wanted to give southwestern Los Angeles time to make it to “shameful retrospect” before a jury was asked to deliver a verdict, and to that end he announced that he would present what is called an affirmative defense at the preliminary hearing. Rather than sitting to the side while the prosecution glossed its case against the McMartin teachers, Davis cross-examined witnesses and filed subpoenas for prosecution documents before a jury was even selected. He hoped a lengthy preliminary hearing would give the panicked atmosphere in Manhattan Beach time to subside, and he also thought it would give him the opportunity to conduct an ad hoc form of discovery, with courtroom cross-examinations standing in for the pretrial depositions that are usually only allowed in civil, not criminal, cases.
Stretching out the hearing in this manner would also give Davis time to map out exactly when each of the child complainants had attended McMartin, which revealed that some of the children had never actually been under Ray Buckey’s supervision at the preschool. The preliminary hearing became a “protracted, serial, comprehensive pre-trial deposition.”24 Then Davis convinced the six lawyers defending the other McMartin teachers that they should join his affirmative defense, and then he convinced Aviva Bobb, the relatively inexperienced judge assigned to preside over the hearing, that the seven defendants should all be treated as part of a single, massive case. That decision gave each of the seven attorneys the right to individually cross-examine any witness called in connection with any defendant.
When they weren’t in court or poring over the MBPD’s investigation reports, these seven attorneys tried to look out for their clients in different ways. Forrest Latiner, a long-time attorney with the public defender’s office, represented Ray Buckey’s sister, Peggy Ann. He was very good at using his enormous mustache to convey moral outrage in interviews with the press. Dean Gits had a quieter personality, and he represented Ray’s mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey. Both lawyers feared for their clients’ safety in jail—inmates once tried to light Peggy Ann’s hair on fire, and Peggy McMartin Buckey sustained minor injuries when she “tripped on a cord”—and so they initially spent much of their time trying to get them out. In June 1984 a judge finally set Peggy Ann’s bail at $250,000 and her mother’s at $1 million, but Ray was denied bail entirely.
Davis kept his client occupied by meeting with him almost every night to watch and transcribe CII interviews, but he also wanted to make sure jail didn’t wear Ray down physically. Ray was in perfect health, and he needed to stay that way. “He was, I think, substantially vegan or vegetarian,” Davis said of Ray, “and he had theories about fruit and vegetable juices and why it’s better to keep the fiber in it, and everything had a detail.” Davis believed that in long and difficult court cases there is very little a defendant can do to meaningfully contribute to his or her own defense, except for one thing, which is to “be in the best shape of your life. . . . Sleep comes with it. Rest comes with it. Handling stress comes with it, and you can control it.” Davis bought two treadmills and donated them to the Manhattan Beach Police Department. One was for the police and one was for Ray.25
In court Davis’s tactics reflected the larger strategy. Easy Reader columnist John A. Jackson described his demeanor:
The attorney’s style is distinctive and maddening. Enduring [Danny Davis’s] cross-examination is like invading Russia without a map. One can expect to be lost most of the time—and to find oneself at last neck-deep in snow.
In a representative 30-minute period last week, Davis asked questions on 19 different topics, moving as though at random from one to another and back again.
From time to time, even one of his fellow defense attorneys will object to a Davis question as vague, irrelevant or without foundation. His slow, soft voice creates a miasma, a thick mental fog; he seems as full of torpor as a basking rattle-snake—and then he strikes.
Davis must be endured to be believed.26
Jackson was one of a small group of journalists who became part of the courtroom scenery. In order to avoid the publicity and snarled traffic associated with the 1984 Summer Olympics, the preliminary hearing was temporarily moved to the northwestern neighborhood of Van Nuys, but by late August it had returned to the downtown Los Angeles Superior Courthouse. These venue changes did not deter the reporters who had spent almost a year waiting for an actual courtroom exchange to transcribe and who now filed detailed pieces on a daily basis. The Los Angeles Times sent Lois Timnick, who had covered crime and psychology for years—the effects of incarceration on the mentally ill, a piece on child suicides, a psychological profile of the Hillside Strangler—before taking up McMartin full-time. The Torrance-based Daily Breeze was the first paper to publish sustained criticism of the prosecution, so angering McMartin parents that a group of them drove out to Torrance to stage a protest. The trial also attracted people from the profession’s margins, such as Paul and Shirley Eberle, a married couple who sat through day after day of courtroom proceedings and eventually wrote a four-hundred-page book about the experience.27 Their previous publishing ventures included the pornographic magazine Finger and a children’s book called The Adventures of Mrs. Pussycat.
John Jackson’s column had the largest initial impact. “McMartin Watch” quickly became essential reading for parents associated with the case. “The first truth that must be faced,” Jackson wrote in the fall of 1984, “is that, beyond any reasonable doubt, the molestations did occur.”28 Although Jackson believed the McMartin teachers were guilty, he took no prosecutorial glee in the prospect of sending Virginia and her family to prison. On the contrary, the idea pained him, as did all the unhappy consequences of what had transpired inside the preschool, and he wrote in strings of anguished, hammy metaphors that allowed readers to refract his pain through their own. The preliminary hearing’s slow pace, the way it seemed to stall completely for days and then weeks at a time, made Jackson especially crazy:
The hearing, before municipal judge Aviva Bobb, ends its seventh week today. So far, only two witnesses have completed their testimony against the seven present defendants, and one of the two testified in secret. Another 98 witnesses, more or less, are due to be called. . . .
Sitting in the courtroom, one feels trapped in a timeless, shapeless space, nibbled at by hordes of ravenous minutiae, droned upon by toneless voices speaking legal jibberish. One feels one is reporting ancient history—or smoke.
The appearances are deceiving. In front of you in the courtroom, Virginia McMartin, the school’s 77-year-old founder, works listlessly on her daily crossword. But behind the surface, often just behind it, an immense human agony is trying to pour itself into the tiny, fragile, misshapen vessels of the law.29
Within weeks of its debut, “McMartin Watch” was one of the Easy Reader’s most successful features. John Jackson fan mail filled up space on the letters page.30
These local reports continued to spool out facts that had received national attention from a very early stage. But during late 1984 and early 1985, what might be called the atmosphere of McMartin—the suspicion, the pervasive sense of threat, the feeling that the pursuit of justice demanded the suspension of disbelief—went national as well. It began when Kee MacFarlane traveled to Washington, DC, to testify again before Congress. Speaking to Democrat Charles Rangel and other members of the Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, MacFarlane said she had spent her “whole 5½ years while I was in Washington screaming about this issue and trying to get Congress and the administration to listen.”31 She noted the irony of the federal government only developing an interest in stopping child abuse after she had finally abandoned the capital for a new life, three thousand miles away. Although she had never heard very much about the sexual abuse of preschoolers during her time in Washington—her focu
s had been on older children and adolescents, the most frequent victims of abuse—her work at CII had put her in “the eye of that storm.”32 Preschool-aged children were “perfect victims,” she said, because “they are trusting, naïve about sex, compliant to the authority of adults, and they come at a developmentally perfect time of magical thinking, when you can convince them of almost anything.”33 She said that substantiated reports of child abuse had been doubling every year since 1976, that the crime knew “no racial, economic, or geographic boundaries,” and that boys were just as vulnerable as girls, if not more so.
That was her preamble. What she said next appeared in the New York Times and other major newspapers the following day:34
What we are dealing with, and I have no idea how widespread it is, I have no idea how much Federal attention it merits, but I think you need to know that I believe we are dealing with no less than conspiracies in these cases, organized operations of child predators, whose operation is designed to prevent detection, and is well insulated against legal intervention.
Preschools in this country in some instances I think we must realize have become a ruse for larger unthinkable networks of crimes against children.
If pornography and prostitution are involved, which is sometimes the case, those networks may have greater financial, legal, and community resources than any of the agencies trying to uncover them.35
MacFarlane knew that her theory might strain credulity, so she came with reassurances. “If these things seem unimaginable to you,” she said, “you are not alone. They have been unimaginable to us as well.”36 After all, she said, McMartin had begun as a routine case—just five interviews with five children—and within three months CII had what she described as “a waiting list of 300 hysterical families.”37