by Richard Beck
National news outlets also broadcast paranoid reports on McMartin. In January 1985 the TV newsmagazine 20/20 aired a bizarre and lengthy report on the case called “Why the Silence?” The program addressed what had long been an annoying stumbling block for McMartin believers: if the abuses were really that bad, how had the teachers managed to keep so many children quiet for so long? Reporter Tom Jarriel explained that the teachers must have used mind-control. “If the seven teachers are indeed guilty of the child abuse charges,” Jarriel said, adding the qualifier necessary to shield the network from libel suits, “it appears they may have also practiced a sophisticated form of behavioral modification. . . . The children’s allegations fall into a pattern that is curiously paralleled to the classic brainwashing techniques used on prisoners of war.”
To bolster this claim, Jarriel interviewed Colonel James Roll, “one of the Army’s leading authorities on brainwashing.” The specter of mind-control had occasionally popped up in different areas of American life ever since the Korean War, when people had sought explanations for a handful of humiliating defections by US soldiers. Roll explained that brainwashing involved a “conditioning process” that targeted several of the victims’ key beliefs and sources of faith. During the broadcast, Jarriel also referred to a graphic depicting what experts had identified as “eight categories of behavioral modification.” The graphic, in the manner of a phrenological diagram from the nineteenth century, depicted the head of a frightened child seen in profile, his brain divided into eight regions: “family,” “isolation,” “drugs,” “torture,” “religion & patriotism,” and others. Jarriel illustrated each of these regions with a snippet from interviews he had conducted with three McMartin children, so that after mentioning “religion and patriotism,” for example, the scene would cut to a child, his face obscured and his voice altered to an eerie croak, explaining how teachers forced children to bury communion wafers in dirt, while another said that children were raped with a flagpole with an American flag attached.
Teachers told the children that the Easter Bunny wouldn’t love them anymore. Teachers locked a child in a refrigerator. Teachers made children “devour” things that had “come from their private parts.” 20/20’s litany of horrors and abuses is so extravagant and imaginative that even the show’s anchors seem to have had trouble accepting what they heard. This is perhaps one of hysteria’s underappreciated traits: it feels hysterical not only after the fact, in Danny Davis’s “shameful retrospect” stage, but at the time, even to people who believe in it. And so at the end of the report, back in the studio, Barbara Walters asked Jarriel about the children’s unexpectedly sophisticated vocabularies. “What about the language these children use,” she asked, “like, ‘oral sex,’ uh . . . ‘they devoured us.’ This is not the language of little kids.” The children’s stories sounded off or somehow inauthentic, and Walters could tell. And it being another of hysteria’s traits that a social panic will sometimes attempt to confess itself in veiled ways, as though to relieve internal pressure, Jarriel replied, “No, understand, these children have been through therapy, they have been thoroughly rehearsed. They know the story over and over because the doctors who have been working with them want to explain in words they can understand what has happened to them.”38
Nobody in Los Angeles saw the 20/20 report. Fearing that the segment could “popularize exploitation of child witnesses,” parents persuaded the local KABC affiliate, despite objections from the parent network, to preempt the segment.39 Proceedings in and around the preliminary hearing, however, took on a surreal tone as the case moved into 1985. To begin with, Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith (Michelle Proby’s pseudonym), coauthors of Michelle Remembers and now a married couple, traveled to Manhattan Beach to visit with the McMartin parents and trade stories about their experiences. Rumors and local TV news reports about weird, potentially satanic rituals performed at St. Cross Episcopal Church had been circulating for months, but after talking to the parents, Pazder concluded that the McMartin case was probably not related to “orthodox Satanism.”40
Inside the courtroom, after months of testimony from parents, children finally began to take the stand, and this provoked a new surge in the media’s interest in the case, among other complications. In Sacramento, final passage of the Senate bill that would allow children to testify via closed-circuit television was still months away, but prosecutors wanted to find some means of easing their witnesses’ minds. They decided to invite comforting adults to join the children in the courtroom as “support persons,” and the first person to accept their invitation was Laurence Tureaud, whose stage name, on television and in the wrestling ring, was Mr. T. It was only a series of successful defense objections that ultimately prevented Tureaud from appearing in court to encourage the testifying children.41
In the spring of 1985, however, it was prosecutors who were objecting to Danny Davis’s attempt to have a television celebrity admitted to the courtroom. The reason had to do with a ten-year-old boy who took the stand in April. Although it is true that a majority of the children who testified only began to reluctantly fabricate their stories under intense pressure from therapists and parents, a few children took to making things up pretty easily. This ten-year-old was one of those few. During several disastrous days of cross-examination, the boy made one incredible claim after another, telling Danny Davis and other defense attorneys that he and other children had been forced to dig up graves on field trips to cemeteries, that teachers had killed classroom pets with knives and hypodermic needles “almost every day,”42 and that on multiple occasions he had been beaten until he was bruised, bloodied, and barely able to stand. In a break from his usual outraged manner with the press, Forrest Latiner greeted reporters with loud laughter during a recess. “Picture seven little dwarfs with pickaxes marching to a grave in broad daylight,” he said. “It’s totally unbelievable.” Prosecutor Glenn Stevens could only helplessly support the boy. “He was terrorized and taken to a cemetery,” Stevens said, “and awful things happened.”43
Stevens didn’t say anything at all to reporters after the boy’s second day on the stand; instead, he “literally sprinted” down the hall toward his office and then shut the door. Earlier that day, Danny Davis had told the boy he wanted to ask a few questions about the strangers the boy kept mentioning as being present at the Episcopal church, the cemetery, and elsewhere. Davis held up a piece of poster board with a bunch of photographs attached, and he asked the child whether he recognized any of the people on the board from his time at the church and the cemetery. Yes, said the boy, he did, and then he pointed to two photos. One was a portrait of James Kenneth Hahn, who was then city attorney–elect for Los Angeles and who would become the city’s mayor in 2001. The other was a picture of the action star Chuck Norris.44 Davis vowed to subpoena Hahn and Norris for testimony unless the district attorney dropped all charges associated with the ten-year-old witness. With lawyers, judges, and reporters alike all estimating that an actual trial was still probably at least a year away, Davis and the other McMartin attorneys had not just raised doubts, however small, about the prosecution’s case—they had made parts of it look silly. Davis’s strategy was working.
The lengthy preliminary hearing subjected the prosecution, its supporters, and Manhattan Beach as a whole to an awful kind of endurance test. The strictly adversarial nature of a criminal trial means that even those attorneys engaged in a noble effort to defend innocent people are also engaged in a less noble effort to make their opponents sorry they ever brought the case before a judge in the first place. Nobody felt this as keenly or with such exquisite sensitivity as John Jackson. Over the course of 1985 his Easy Reader column documented the process by which Jackson, without ever wavering in his belief that dozens, if not hundreds, if not one thousand children had been the victims of a conspiracy, came to doubt that justice in the South Bay was worth the cost. “The McMartin case’s hallmark,” he wrote in the spring, “seems to be
its thunderous, soul-destroying inevitability. Every party to it seems like a boulder rolling downhill toward some greater ruin.”45 Like many people associated in peripheral ways with the prosecution, Jackson believed that the case was going to fail in some crucial way not because of human error or any flaw in the evidence but because the judicial system itself was inherently unequipped to address such a horror. “Beneath the steady courtroom drone of the McMartin preliminary hearing,” he wrote, “one can often hear another sound, a sound repeated, deep and insistent, like a bass accompaniment: the crash of collapsing institutions.”46 The implications of this idea filled him with dread.
“I found myself trying to assess dispassionately the exact degree of terror felt by a crying child whom I could not reassure or even see,” Jackson wrote, “while other adults, who were not frightened, squabbled all around me like beasts over her bones.” Jackson wrote this in the middle of 1985, by which point his dread had turned into despair. Not only had his community failed to protect its children from abuse, but it had then compounded the error by leaving kids at the mercy of a heartless judicial machine. Here he was unwittingly half-correct. The children who endured hours of therapeutic interviews, parental questioning, and police visits only to wind up believing they had been raped by Satanists were certainly victims of something, as were the children who knew nothing had happened but said it had anyway. It is also true that the judicial system performed poorly in many respects. By September Jackson was reporting that in a single morning Judge Bobb threw out 81 of Danny Davis’s 114 questions as “irrelevant, vague, already answered, or improper.”47 It is an obnoxious attorney who only asks 33 appropriate questions over the course of an entire morning, but it is also a completely overmatched judge, a judge with very little control over her courtroom, who can’t get an attorney to cut it out with the inappropriate questions.
Jackson didn’t know whether he could continue writing about the case:
It seems to me that without a strong sense of community responsibility, one is certain to become a voyeur or a panderer, recounting these horrors for the thrills they may give and, therefore, becoming complicitous with them. . . . For me, distrust and frustration have become endemic. I no longer trust, for example, the prosecution’s competence or its intellectual honesty. I no longer really expect justice to be done or my community or its molested children to be healed, even as I become ever more fully aware of how essential those results truly are.
In the name of humanity, I am coming to hate and fear the touch of humankind.48
By November, Jackson was exhausted, and the Easy Reader’s editors needed someone whose coverage could provide a more skeptical view. “The hearing is not a terminal destination,” Jackson wrote in his final column, “but a sort of funnel or refinery. Information goes in one end, and, to complete the metaphor, a type of poison comes out the other.”49
The preliminary hearing ended on January 9, 1986, seventeen months after it had begun. Judge Bobb ruled that all seven defendants would stand trial on 135 counts. Eight days later, however, District Attorney Ira Reiner announced that only Ray and his mother, Peggy, would be prosecuted. His office dropped all charges against Virginia McMartin, Peggy Ann Buckey, Mary Ann Jackson, Betty Raidor, and Babette Spitler. Peggy McMartin Buckey made bail and went home after two years and one day in jail.
The poison to which John A. Jackson referred had obvious effects on the defendants, their families, those whose businesses suffered after a police search, and the pastor and congregation at St. Cross Episcopal Church. But those effects may have been most pronounced in the case of Judy Johnson, who ultimately found the investigation too much to bear. As her mind deteriorated over the course of 1985, so did her drinking increase. She once threatened a relative on her doorstep with a shotgun, after which she was hospitalized for a voluntary psychiatric evaluation. She was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia. Custody of Johnson’s two children was handed over to her father, who lived in Washington State.50
Deputy District Attorney Glenn Stevens, who, along with Lael Rubin and Christine Johnson, was one of three prosecutors to work on McMartin, either left or was removed from the case shortly after the end of the preliminary hearing. His departure was precipitated by an article published in the Daily Breeze that described doubts Stevens had raised inside the DA’s office about the validity of the McMartin students’ accusations. Stevens was young and affable, very good with the media, and he could often be found surrounded by reporters after the day’s courtroom business had come to an end. But the prosecution needed to project unwavering confidence in their case, so Stevens was out. He resigned from the district attorney’s office and took a job with a group of criminal defense lawyers. Then, though the story would not become public until the end of 1986, he spent many evenings during the spring and summer at the home of a prominent Hollywood screenwriter, talking for more than thirty hours about what he and his former colleagues actually thought about their case. The screenwriter and his wife made tapes of everything Glenn Stevens said.
Abby Mann won an Academy Award for the screenplay to Judgment at Nuremberg, in which Spencer Tracy presides over the American military tribunals that followed the end of World War II, and he continued to mine trials for dramatic material for the rest of his career. He wrote a muckraking TV film about the Atlanta child murders of the late seventies and early eighties, and as cracks in the McMartin case began to appear, he saw another opportunity. He contacted many people associated with the case and asked them to talk, and Glenn Stevens returned the call and signed a contract. Talking over glasses of wine in the home Abby Mann shared with his wife, Myra, Stevens was both nervous and excited. “By the way, Myra, what do you do after all these tapes are transcribed?” he asked during one meeting. “Do you erase them clean?”
Myra answered, “Yeah, of course.”51
Stevens must have known that the publication of what he was about to say would torpedo many of the professional relationships on which his career depended. But this anxiety had to be weighed against the prospect of being turned into the heroic, truth-telling protagonist of a film written by established Hollywood screenwriters. Abby and Myra Mann suggested that famous actors would be drawn to the part. “Like Abby says,” Myra said during a meeting, “it’s an incredible starring role for a male, you know, to be conflicted.”52
Stevens said doubts about the case had gnawed at him for a long time. As the prosecutor assigned to organize and coordinate police searches of the McMartin teachers’ homes and other areas, he was often the first member of the prosecution to examine the physical evidence firsthand. Again and again, nothing turned up where something was supposed to turn up. He watched all of the McMartin-Buckeys’ home movies. “My god, did we end up with rolls and rolls,” he said. “They were stupid movies about trips to Mexico, you know, ‘us on the beach.’” Then he read through Virginia’s diary and was disappointed to find another collection of “just regular stuff”: “You know, ‘Today Peggy called me from South Dakota,’ and you know, mom stuff. Ah, ‘Today UCLA played in the NCAA championship against Louisville and lost. Darn, I was so upset.’ This is the kind of stuff she writes. She’s a Lakers fan, I swear.”53
According to Stevens’s account, the early stages of the investigation revealed the McMartin-Buckeys to be exactly the kind of family their defense attorneys had always said they were: close-knit, devoted to life at the preschool, and led by a sports-obsessed matriarch who was once chastised by a judge for chatting with jurors about the previous day’s Angels game. “It wasn’t like going out and interviewing X number of witnesses in a murder case, and the leads all produce evidence,” Stevens said. “Here, the leads all produced nothing. The leads turned to leads turned to leads turned to leads.”54
Despite the lack of evidence, of course, the district attorney’s office plowed ahead. Lael Rubin stood before a judge at one early hearing and said, “It’s abundantly clear the horrors we have found at th
at nursery school have affected an entire generation of children.” Stevens recalled this hearing at the Manns’ and then said, “Keep in mind, none of that was proven.”55 He said the DA’s office was sure that real evidence would turn up somewhere by the time the case made it through a grand jury to trial, and he said he and his colleagues had allowed themselves this overconfidence because they were ambitious. Philibosian, he said, “wanted to develop name identification.” Lael Rubin, he said, “looked at McMartin as her own personal slingshot to get to starhood.”56 Rubin’s ambitions were no secret around the DA’s office, Stevens said—coworkers had even warned him against agreeing to work with her. But then Stevens had ambitions of his own: “I mean, I always knew what I wanted out of McMartin. You know, I wanted to be able to do hard work on getting convictions and then either, you know, get promoted into, to, ultimately the management in the district attorney’s office or, or go along, you know, to a judgeship or whatever. And it was like that’s just part of a career stepping-stone of mine.”57
Stevens’s self-regard seems to have made Abby and Myra Mann a little suspicious. Here was their leading man, the one member of the prosecution willing to speak up about what the Manns thought was an obvious miscarriage of justice. So then why, if Stevens really thought the case was a product of “hysteria,” had he kept quiet for so long? Why hadn’t he raised any of his doubts in public? Had he been gullible, or cynical, or what? Stevens needed to say that he had been neither, and so he found himself in the position of having to argue that in a certain light, from a certain angle, at a particular time, things had not looked that crazy at all. “We searched just about the entire city of Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach, and we came up empty,” Stevens said. But there was another side to the story: “And the other side is the investigation was so botched from the beginning that [the defendants] had ample opportunity to destroy or get rid of every bit of evidence.” There were also the children to consider. Stevens just didn’t believe CII could have “brainwashed” that many of them. The only option was to “keep on plugging with testimony and keep plugging [with the] investigation and, uh, see what comes up.”58