by Richard Beck
Parents—especially Judy Johnson—came up repeatedly. In his conversations with the Manns, Stevens provided a detailed look at what those working for the prosecution thought of the McMartin parents as witnesses, as constituents whose favor and approval had to be courted, and, when prosecutors failed to secure that approval, as political and media adversaries. Stevens started work on McMartin in April 1984, and one of his first tasks was to look over leads phoned in by parents and decide which ones merited a search warrant. These leads were a mess: “‘I heard from Mrs. Smith who heard from Mrs. McDonald that her daughter was at the McMartin school.’” Or, “‘I remember my kid came home and said that, that Peggy took a carload of kids over to Mrs. Gooch’s market.’”59
It was during this effort to sort out the chaotic tangle of suspicion and innuendo that coalesced around McMartin that Stevens met Judy Johnson for the first time. “She’s really weird,” Stevens remembered Lael Rubin telling him of “Judy J” in the spring of 1984. When he asked what exactly she meant by weird, Rubin said, “Well, you’ll find out when you get to meet her.” The district attorney’s office quickly flagged Johnson as a problematic source, and Stevens drove to her home in an apprehensive mood. “Should Judy testify?” he remembered wondering. “I mean, is Judy nuts, as we all seem to think?” Meeting Judy briefly eased his fears—“She gives direct answers,” he said. “She’s not going off the deep end.” But the interview with Judy’s son was less reassuring: “Well, I sit down and I say, ‘Hi, Matthew.’ He’d look up and just smile. ‘My name’s Glenn. I’m your lawyer. I’m going to court with your mommy and I’m here to talk to her about the stuff that happened to you.’ He never said anything.”60
With Matthew apparently unable to communicate any of the substance of his allegations to Stevens, even the notion that Matthew had made allegations in the first place was little more than hearsay. Stevens had to trust that Judy was accurately reporting her son’s accounts of preschool, and as word of her increasingly strange phone calls to the police began to circulate, this became difficult for Stevens to do. “I was always worried,” he said, “that she would not be really sane when she came into court and that some of this bizarre stuff would start to come out on the witness stand.”
As the investigation moved toward the preliminary hearing, Stevens made periodic visits to Judy, who would eventually testify. “Keeping track of her wasn’t the hard part,” he told the Manns, “but keeping track of her mind at the same time was tough . . . cause sometimes they’d be in two different places.” Although the testimony she delivered in Judge Bobb’s courtroom went relatively well, Stevens became concerned about Judy during the months that followed. Two weeks after she testified, Judy called to report that her home had been burglarized. “Nothing was taken,” Stevens remembered her saying. “However, Matthew was sodomized.”61 Judy said the perpetrator was an AWOL Marine who had removed a window screen from outside and then entered the house. Judy didn’t see the man commit the act, but Matthew’s butt was red—the police needed to come immediately.
“It slipped through everybody’s analytical process,” Stevens said, “to sit down and wonder exactly what kind of woman this is and what is going on here.”62 The Manns asked Stevens whether he and Lael Rubin ever discussed Judy Johnson’s mental health. “Sure, we got a good laugh about Judy,” Stevens said, but he claimed they never discussed any of what Judy’s mental decline meant for the case, the McMartin children, or the defendants. Stevens did not explain how he and Rubin managed to avoid having this conversation, but the instrumental logic of criminal prosecution may have helped. If Judy continued to make her court dates, her difficulties were not actually a problem for the prosecution, and even in the Manns’ living room Stevens seems to have believed that what he knew did not need to affect the trial’s outcome. Throughout the taped conversations Stevens insisted that nothing he said be made public until after the jury delivered a verdict. One could understand a prosecutor whose doubts about a case become so troubling that he feels he must speak out, but Stevens was pointedly not speaking out, even months after severing his professional ties to the case’s outcome. One night Stevens made his case for keeping the Manns’ film and his involvement under wraps until the trial’s end:
Stevens: Abby, let me tell you something. You can’t honestly believe that there is a chance in the world these people will be convicted, do you?
Myra Mann: They will not be convicted.
Stevens: There’s no way . . .
Myra: That’s why, that’s why all these cowards . . .
Stevens: That’s why this . . .
Abby Mann: Well, for our project . . .
Stevens: That’s why this has got to wait.
Abby: For our project, they better not be.
Stevens: Yes, to our project. We drink to an acquittal.63
So long as Stevens’s conversations with the Manns remained private, and so long as the Manns had to wait for the trial’s conclusion to move forward with their film, the only immediate beneficiary of Glenn Stevens’s crisis of conscience was Glenn Stevens. In addition to the money that came his way as a paid consultant to the Manns, Stevens was able to talk through his role in a case that obviously did weigh on him, at least sometimes.
He recounted one episode with Judy Johnson in especially vivid detail. At some point in the second half of 1984, Stevens said, Judy Johnson called from Seattle. She was in the hospital, and she didn’t know why. “All she knows,” Stevens said, “is that she was in her Volkswagen bus, and she was with the kids, and, ah, she was driving up to Seattle, and, ah, that they were being followed by a car with the Marine in it.” Then Stevens didn’t hear from her for a few days, and then she called to say that actually she had not been at the hospital—she had been staying with friends the whole time. On the way back to Los Angeles she called Stevens again from somewhere in Northern California and said the Marine was following her. Would Stevens please send an investigator to help? “Judy, you know, why don’t you just get back to Los Angeles,” Stevens told her, and she did. Then she called again to report that her son had been molested by Roberta Weintraub, a member of the Los Angeles County school board. “Matthew saw her on TV,” Stevens remembered Johnson saying, “and said, ‘Mom, she molested me.’” Stevens didn’t explain exactly what it was that set this particular phone call apart from all the others, but it made Johnson’s mental condition real to him for the first time. “All of a sudden,” he told the Manns, “I just wanted to stuff a sock in her mouth.”64
The conversations between Glenn Stevens and Abby and Myra Mann wrapped up by midsummer. Half a year later, on the same day a judge denied another of Ray Buckey’s bail requests, police entered Judy Johnson’s home and found her body in the bedroom upstairs. She died of internal hemorrhaging—friends said she had suffered from ulcers for years, and these may have been exacerbated by her alcoholism, which, in the last months of her life, became severe. “She made the McMartin case,” said Bob Currie, one of Johnson’s close friends.65 When they found her there was food in the cupboard, an empty bottle of rum in the trash, and a subpoena from Danny Davis stuck in the mail slot.
Chapter 5
FBI, DSM, XXX
The panic swept across the country in the middle of the 1980s. In addition to the original trio of cases—McMartin, Kern County, and Jordan—allegations of bizarre or ritualistic abuse triggered investigations in dozens of communities. In El Paso, Texas, Michelle Noble and Gayle Dove, two women working part-time at the East Valley YMCA, were accused of taking many of the children they watched to Noble’s home and abusing them. A number of men were also thought to have been involved in the abuse, a prosecutor said, but because the children had only seen them dressed as monsters and werewolves, these men had been difficult to identify.1 In the Bronx five men were convicted of abusing children at day care centers throughout the borough, one of them almost entirely on the basis of testimony provided by a three-year-ol
d who endured hours of police interviews. The investigation eventually expanded to include fourteen city facilities. A few hours to the north, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a nineteen-year-old teacher’s aide named Bernard Baran was convicted of abusing five children and then sentenced to several consecutive life terms in prison. Baran was openly gay, and during his trial the prosecutor told the jury that hiring a gay man to work in a day care was like putting “a chocoholic in a candy store.”2 The day care cases lent new energy to the old homophobic idea that gay men were naturally predisposed to become child abusers.
Bizarre abuse involving rituals and defecation as well as the production of child pornography were alleged in two other Massachusetts cases, one of them in Malden and the other in New Braintree. Children in Maplewood, New Jersey, testified that a woman named Kelly Michaels had abused them during naptime, licking peanut butter off their genitals and also raping them with kitchen utensils. In Miami, District Attorney Janet Reno (eventually to become President Clinton’s attorney general) led the successful prosecution of Frank Fuster, a Cuban immigrant, and his seventeen-year-old wife, Ileana, who ran a babysitting service out of their home in Country Walk, a small suburb. Both were accused of abusing the children in sadistic rituals and feeding them unspecified mind-altering drugs. Ileana was deported to her native Honduras after serving three and a half years of a ten-year sentence, and Frank continues to serve a sentence of six consecutive life terms. Other cases appeared in Memphis, Tennessee; Niles, Michigan; Spencer Township, Ohio; Chicago, Illinois; Clarkesville, Maryland; and at the military academy’s day care center in West Point, New York.
For all that these cases had in common, there were also many differences among them, innumerable distinctions and details, both small and large. Some resulted in convictions, some in acquittals, and sometimes prosecutors dropped charges before they made it to a courtroom. Nearly half the accused were women. Some were in their sixties and seventies, and a few others were in their teens. Defendants came from the working class, the inner city, and affluent suburbs. And although many prosecutors’ targets would eventually turn out to be completely innocent of the charges filed against them, there were also cases in which the tales of ritualistic, theatrical abuse obscured and buried abuse that seems to have actually occurred, abuse for which there is sadly no better word than “normal.” In Pittsfield a four-year-old boy really did contract venereal disease, after which the boy’s mother called the police to identify Bernard Baran as the likely culprit. When social services interviewed the boy, however, he unambiguously claimed to have been abused by his mother’s boyfriend, who was never charged with a crime.
But although these details and the various social and legal situations that produced them had drastic consequences on an individual, case-by-case basis, they were not part of how the imagined child care sex abuse crisis described itself as it took the national stage. Local news was both useful and awful in all of the usual ways. Sometimes important facts would slip out in the midst of endless expressions of concern and anxiety, and sometimes they wouldn’t. It was the national news reports, however, that helped people to understand ritual abuse as a larger phenomenon, a disturbing trend. Many of these reports used the word “increasingly.” An article in People magazine on the Jordan sex rings, a report in the New York Times on Kee MacFarlane’s Senate testimony, a cover story in Time magazine on a “wrenching” question, “Who’s minding the kids?”—whatever their differences, all of these pieces of writing told the same simple story.3 They were supplemented by the 20/20 McMartin reports and made-for-TV trauma narratives like Something About Amelia, which starred Ted Danson and Glenn Close and became one of the highest-rated programs in the medium’s history.
The news media always makes for a convenient scapegoat when something goes wrong on a large scale, but a basic chronological problem suggests that it shouldn’t receive too much of the blame for the panic’s spread. For the most part the actual investigations and trials came before the national news reports about the investigations and trials. In many cases, by the time any national broadcast or print journalists made it to a town where ritual abuse was thought to have taken place, some, most, or all of the following would have already occurred. Police, having been presented with allegations of abuse and having found them credible, would have opened an investigation that targeted anything from a single individual to dozens of people. Therapists or detectives, having been asked to interview abuse victims, would have uncovered crimes on a scale neither the police nor the children’s parents could have imagined. Parents would have organized search parties, founded political organizations, set up community meetings, and lobbied for new legislation, while grand juries would have delivered piles of charging documents to the city or county prosecutor. Professional organizations, legal and judicial institutions, friends, neighbors, and civic groups, all working together, got their respective local panics up and running well in advance of any sustained media attention. The media transmits and amplifies hysteria; it refines the stories told by paranoid fringe groups looking to frighten themselves. But hysteria doesn’t take root in society until it can work its way into a community’s most important institutions: the government, the justice system, the schools, medicine. In this respect it behaves just like any other issue around which people mobilize and around which social change takes place.
As police departments around the country began to take ritual abuse more seriously in the mid-1980s, one figure who popped up again and again in conference reports and law enforcement publications was the FBI’s Kenneth Lanning. After years of work as a field agent, Lanning joined the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) in 1981. The BSU was established at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, in 1972, and the people who worked there trained aspiring agents in political science, sociology, criminology, and psychology. They did a lot of work on serial killers and child molesters, flying out to California to interview Charles Manson in prison and then working up “profiles” of different criminal types. Although the appearance of BSU agent Clarice Starling in the successful crime novel and subsequent film The Silence of the Lambs would lend the unit a measure of celebrity and glamour, Lanning’s early work mostly revolved around teaching and research.4
Lanning also spent a lot of time teaching classes at the FBI’s National Academy, where the students were not future employees of the federal government but local cops. The National Academy was founded in 1935, but an influx of government funding in the late sixties and early seventies drastically expanded its reach. Four times a year, police chiefs at local law enforcement agencies in all fifty states nominated officers they viewed as promising leadership material to attend a series of ten-week courses in Quantico. All of these courses were taught by people with graduate degrees—at least a master’s—and their goal was both to specialize and professionalize the police, a group for whom, in much of the country, the only necessary qualification had traditionally been that your father was friends with the sitting sheriff. For accepted students the National Academy was an intense, sophisticated educational experience, following which they could return home with a new credential and all the prestige that went with it. For Lanning and his colleagues, people engaged primarily in academic research and the training of young and intimidated FBI recruits, the NA students provided a welcome influx of hands-on law enforcement experience, anecdotes, and case histories against which their theories could be tested or at least argued out.
Another happy by-product of the National Academy program became apparent by the early 1980s: student by student, class by class, the FBI had cultivated a lively network of law enforcement contacts from around the country. Former students would ask their old teachers to get on a plane and teach a class to other members of the local department, or they would phone to ask for some academic insight into a tricky case. Lanning remembers that by 1983 he was receiving more phone calls than he could keep up with, and that in addition to research and instruction, his job now included
a substantial amount of consultation. The FBI’s influence over the practice of American law enforcement had moved outside the classroom and into the field. One thing that Lanning found interesting was the fact that his colleagues in sociology and political science did not move into consulting. Local cops wanted to talk to the criminologists and the psychologists, and slowly, Lanning says, the line separating those two disciplines within the FBI began to disappear.
Lanning received his first phone call about ritual abuse in early 1983. A police officer had just interviewed a woman who described how she had been abused when she was a little girl by a group of people that included her parents. “It was a horrendous case,” Lanning said, “involving killing people, mutilating bodies, drinking blood.” The police officer wanted to know whether Lanning had ever encountered a similar set of crimes, and though he had worked on a variety of gruesome cases during his career, this seemed unusually extravagant. “I kind of never heard it all together in one case,” Lanning said. A few weeks later he received a call from another law enforcement contact who wanted to talk about the strange abuses an adult woman claimed to have experienced as a child. “Jesus,” Lanning thought, “I already heard about that case!”5 But the two cases only sounded the same—the women involved were different people. A few weeks after that, Lanning received a call about similar allegations centered on a day care center, and within nine months the number of police departments soliciting his advice on ritual abuse investigations rose to twenty or thirty.