by Richard Beck
Frank and Ileana were arrested and jailed, and for months the pair wrote love letters to each other every day. Frank was to be tried first, and prosecutors used the Bragas’ interview tapes to craft a lean and ingenious set of charges. Frank faced eight counts of sexual battery and seven counts of lewd and lascivious assault against children, but prosecutors also included a final charge of aggravated assault. “On numerous occasions,” the document read, Frank had threatened the children, worn frightening masks, locked kids in closets and given them drugs, danced naked, fondled the children’s genitals, and forced them to eat excrement. The document connected each of these charges with an “and/or,” making the aggravated assault count a kind of clearinghouse for all of the children’s stranger allegations. Under Florida criminal law, jurors only needed to believe that one of these things had happened—it didn’t at all matter which—in order to return a guilty verdict.63
It did not help Frank Fuster that he was an awful defendant. Janet Reno’s office discovered that Frank had two prior convictions on his criminal record: one for first-degree manslaughter and the other, more ominously, for lewd and lascivious assault on a minor. In 1982 Frank was convicted of fondling a nine-year-old girl’s chest and genitals through her clothes late one night in a car after a party. Frank had always maintained his innocence, but that obviously looked very bad. His decision to marry a teenager while in his thirties cannot have helped either. Frank also failed to make a good impression in court. Against his attorney’s advice, he repeatedly held dramatic, rambling press conferences at which he would lash out at Reno, the district attorney’s office, and the legal system in general. On the witness stand he went beyond denying that he had molested the children or danced with them in the nude, staking out some obscure technical grounds on which to claim that Ileana had not actually been running a babysitting service. He said he had never met many of the children he was accused of molesting, and when parents testified that they had often seen Frank in the house when they arrived to pick up or drop off their children, he called them liars. Once, he held a towel to his face, stopped answering questions, and seemed to go into a catatonic trance. His mother came over the railing, grabbed her son, and yelled in Spanish, “Be strong, Frank! Be strong like your mother! Be strong against the enemy.”64
Ileana was a trickier case. Trying a strange, self-aggrandizing man with prior convictions for child abuse was one thing, but what to do with the shy, obviously naïve teenager? If the abuse had occurred in anything like the manner described by prosecutors, Ileana must have seen it, and according to the Bragas’ interviews, she had also participated. Yet she sat in jail for months, alternating between long stays in solitary confinement and stints in the general population, maintaining her innocence all the while. She withstood fourteen sessions with a well-known Miami psychiatrist named Charles Mutter as well as pressure from her lawyer, Michael Von Zamft, who believed Frank was a pedophile and that Ileana should testify against him. She became so close with Shirley Blando, the jail’s chaplain, that she began to call her “Mom Shirley,” and in a later deposition Blando said Ileana frequently talked about a lack of trust in her attorney. “She was afraid of her lawyer,” Blando said. “She would say, ‘They want me to say something that is not true.’”65 Ileana also allowed, in one of her conversations with Blando, that Frank had hit her once. Von Zamft hoped he could persuade Ileana to depict herself as another of Frank’s victims.
Ileana was removed from the jail’s general population and returned to isolation in the summer of 1985. Years later she claimed that she was periodically kept naked, cold, crying, and depressed in a cell numbered 3A1.66 During her time in the cell she began to say that Frank had hit her not once but on multiple occasions, that he had pressured her into having sex with him soon after they met, and that he had also hit his son, Noel. This description of a relatively common form of spousal abuse was a start, but Ileana maintained through the end of July that she had never seen Frank molest children, and a psychiatrist who examined her concluded that she “did not have any sort of amnesia or memory disturbance.” So Von Zamft brought in another psychiatrist, Norman Reichenberg, to have a look at his client. He concluded that Ileana, in essence, was “an extremely needy child” who had fallen completely under the sway of her brutal and domineering husband. In a subsequent competency hearing, Von Zamft told a judge that Ileana’s extreme psychological dependence upon Frank would make it impossible to defend herself while standing trial alongside him. “The only valid defense that counsel perceives in this case,” Von Zamft said, “requires that this defendant be prepared to give testimony against the codefendant.”67
Von Zamft had essentially promised Ileana’s confession. Now Ileana needed to provide it. It was at this point that Country Walk’s character changed, as for the first time, a ritual abuse investigation began to apply some of the techniques developed by multiple personality therapists to a defendant. Von Zamft contacted Michael Rappaport and Merry Sue Haber, two psychologists with a practice called Behavior Changers. The pair quickly developed an intense interest in Ileana. Later Michael told a journalist that he billed the state of Florida for between thirty-five and forty hours, and he told a judge that he spent more time with Ileana than he had with any other patient in his professional career.68 He also told the judge that over the course of his sessions with Ileana he had come to understand, as nobody else did, the depths of Frank’s evil as well as the effects it had on his wife. “If you were a prisoner of war or if you were forced to play the violin when the Nazis were killing the Jews in a concentration camp,” Rappaport said, “you might understand that people can be forced to do things.”69
Rappaport and Haber walked Ileana through “relaxation” and “visualization” exercises. They asked Ileana to close her eyes, and then they described allegations the children had made and asked her to confirm them. “They would tell me the name of the children,” Ileana said. “I couldn’t remember all of them, so they would correct me again. And we would do this over and over until I got the memory piece that supposedly was missing.”70 Although these exercises failed to produce anything Ileana could recognize as an actual memory, she began to have vivid nightmares about abuse at Country Walk. She told the psychologists about these nightmares, and they assured her that she was beginning to remember. These assurances were supplemented, according to Ileana, by several nighttime visits from Janet Reno, who reminded Ileana that her testimony against Frank was necessary to avoid a lengthy prison term.71 “It’s a lot like reverse brainwashing,” Rappaport told a reporter. “We just spent hours and hours talking to her. . . . It’s kind of a manipulation.” They told her that confessing to the abuse and testifying against Frank was in her best interest. “It was very much like dealing with a child,” Rappaport said. “You make them feel very happy, then segue into the hard things.”72
Just a few weeks after her first meeting with Rappaport and Haber, Ileana said for the first time that she and Frank were guilty. Then she gave a series of depositions. She said Frank had repeatedly raped her, that he had forced her to have oral sex with the children, and that he had inserted an unloaded gun into her vagina and fired blanks. (Even without bullets, this last one would have caused extremely serious injuries.) She said Frank had hung her from the ceiling of their garage while children watched and that he had poured acid on her once while she was in the shower. She also said that Frank had brought a snake into the house, scared the children with it, and then put it inside and on her body before finally depositing it in a bucket on the porch. Rappaport sat through these depositions with Ileana, and when she had trouble recalling details or said she could not remember, the psychologist would request a break so that the two of them could speak privately in a separate room. When they returned, Ileana would have the required details ready. “What did he do to you that night?” Ileana was asked at one point. “I can’t remember now,” Ileana said.
“You can’t remember,” Rappaport interjected, �
�or you don’t want to?”73
Ileana pled guilty. She testified against her husband in court, and then she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. At Frank’s trial jurors viewed videotapes of the Bragas’ child interviews, and then Roland Summit appeared to explain that, because of the Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, leading questions were sometimes needed to “push” children through the “window of disclosure.” The jury deliberated for two days, and then it convicted Frank on all charges. He was sentenced to six consecutive life terms in prison plus 15 years for parole violation, with a minimum total sentence of 165 years. The speed and efficiency with which Janet Reno was able to obtain her convictions indicated just how much the legal, medical, and psychiatric professions had learned, how enthusiastically they incorporated what had recently been fringe ideas as part of standard procedure. All of this happened very quickly: when Fuster went to prison, the McMartin trial still had not yet begun.
Chapter 6
McMartin—The Trial
The private evening conversations at which McMartin prosecutor Glenn Stevens expressed his doubts about the case and about Judy Johnson’s mental health to screenwriters Abby and Myra Mann were finally made public in November 1986, about half a year after they had taken place. The trial itself was still nowhere in sight—jury selection hadn’t even begun. The case had been mired in motions and procedural hearings for nearly a year. Stevens’s skepticism about the merits of the case, however, was extensively reported in the Easy Reader, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Breeze, and other newspapers, and it sparked a brief media scrum that was reminiscent of McMartin’s breathless early days. Myra and Abby were both summoned to testify about the Stevens tapes, and although Myra’s testimony in particular was inconsistent and vague, the important facts were eventually established. The Manns had paid Stevens $1,000 for his time and had also promised him 5 percent of the profits from their future book and/or film. They were initially reluctant to give their tapes to the attorney general’s office, Myra said, but their attorney had made it clear that not doing so left them vulnerable to obstruction of justice charges. At the end of her day on the stand, Myra apologized to reporters for her inconsistencies, explaining that she had been up late the night before, studying the tapes. “I was a banana head,” she said.1
The tapes made problems for the prosecution that extended well beyond palace intrigue and workplace disagreements. Some of what Stevens said led to an investigation as to whether Lael Rubin had intentionally withheld information from Danny Davis and the other defense attorneys, including two documents that were obviously relevant to Judy Johnson’s mental state in the initial stages of the investigation. One was a statement by Johnson in which she alleged that McMartin teachers had put staples in her son’s ears and scissors in his eyes. The other was a letter Johnson wrote to an investigator claiming her son had been taken to Los Angeles International airport and then flown out of the city. The DA had originally received these statements during a time when the credibility of the children’s allegations was very much up for debate, and Rubin was obligated by law to provide the McMartin-Buckeys’ attorneys with any exculpatory evidence her office uncovered. Instead, Rubin filed the statements away, and the McMartin defense team went about its business completely unaware of Judy Johnson’s mental health issues. “My negligence was responsible for it not being turned over,” Rubin said on the witness stand. She said she had simply forgotten about the report “under the crush of work” and that there had been no malicious intent behind the lapse.2 A judge believed Rubin and denied Danny Davis’s motion to declare a mistrial. A few weeks later Glenn Stevens received partial immunity from criminal prosecution—he faced the possibility of being charged with obstruction of justice and unauthorized removal of a public record—in exchange for his testimony. He told Danny Davis about keeping Judy Johnson’s strangest allegations secret, and then he said, “I no longer believe that [Ray Buckey] is legally guilty.”3
Stevens’s testimony capped a very bad couple of months for his former office. November had also seen the first nationally televised report expressing skepticism that the McMartin children had ever been abused. 60 Minutes was then the most prestigious news program in the country, and Mike Wallace’s report provided both sympathetic portrayals of the defendants and straightforward critiques of the prosecutors and therapists. “The United States has the rottenest judicial system in the whole world,” Virginia McMartin said. “Don’t let anybody talk to me about Russia or South Africa or anything. We have it right here.” Babette Spitler talked about having her own children taken away, and Peggy Ann said she wanted to get her teaching credentials back. The report gave District Attorney Ira Reiner some space in which to maneuver; he had replaced Robert Philibosian at the end of 1984, and he blamed his predecessor for filing charges against so many people without conducting a thorough investigation. “You’re charging Philibosian with an unprofessional job,” Wallace said in his interview with Reiner, who replied, “Well, that hardly begins to describe it.”4
Lael Rubin appeared in the 60 Minutes piece as well. The word for her affect is probably “embattled.” “Very large numbers of children were molested at the school,” Rubin said, refusing to address her case’s diminished size following Reiner’s decision to drop charges against five of the seven original defendants. “I don’t see that at this point whether one says there were fifty, or one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred—that is really beside the point at this point in time. . . . The issue is that children were molested at the school, whether there be two or whether there be a hundred!” Wallace responded by arguing that the difference between two molested children and one hundred molested children was actually very significant—two child victims and one adult defendant would never have received so much media attention. Then he asked Rubin about the allegations of Satanism that had floated around during the preliminary hearing, and Rubin would not disavow them entirely. “We did have testimony at the preliminary hearing,” she said, “about some activities that I suppose one would refer to as Satanic.”
The piece finally pivoted to Ray Buckey, speaking to a journalist for the first time since his arrest more than three years earlier. He was visibly angry. “You gotta have a scapegoat,” he said, making use of the term at the heart of his lawyer’s theory of social panic, when asked why Reiner had dismissed charges against all of the defendants except for him and his mother, Peggy. “You kept two people in jail for two years. You’re gonna back off now and say, ‘Sorry, they’re innocent too’? It’s an amazing fact that you can have the same evidence, with the same children testifying against all seven, but you can say there’s weak evidence against five of them.” Wallace asked Buckey what he planned to do if he eventually went free. “They’ve ruined my life,” Buckey said. “I hadn’t made up my mind of what I wanted to do in life. But they’ve put a scarlet letter on me that I can never get rid of. I don’t know what kind of life I could have.”5
The 60 Minutes story, the dropped charges, and the Glenn Stevens debacle marked a qualitative change in how people talked and thought about McMartin, but the shift wasn’t immediate. As attorneys prepared to work through what they expected to be a grueling jury selection process, a university professor surveyed Angelenos and found that 97.4 percent of those who knew about the case thought Ray Buckey was guilty (92 percent believed the same of Peggy McMartin Buckey). At the same time, the survey also found that 42.4 percent of respondents thought the therapists had planted ideas in the children’s heads, with 22 percent believing that the satanic allegations were absurd on their face.6 Other developments around the South Bay in early 1987 may have reinforced these beliefs. In Hermosa Beach the Sheriff’s Department told parents of some forty children who had allegedly been molested at St. Cross Episcopal Church that the case was being officially closed. This was the church to which some McMartin parents believed their children had been taken in the middle of the night for satanic rituals. The deputy district atto
rney in charge of the case said her decision not to prosecute was based on the complete lack of physical evidence and corroborative testimony. The St. Cross parents said they were disappointed. “We can’t go away because the pain won’t go away,” one said. “Our children are still having nightmares from what happened to them.”7
As therapists and police had formalized their techniques in the mid-1980s, making them easier to disseminate to other parts of the country, so now did skepticism of the child care and ritual abuse investigations take on a methodical and systematic quality. Journalists began to work out how these cases had come to trial in the first place, and by identifying the really crucial institutions, legislative developments, and therapeutic and medical practices, they began to make these bewildering trials intelligible to the public. In March 1987, for example—jury selection in the McMartin trial had still not begun—Kevin Cody wrote a cover story for the Easy Reader called “A Rat in the Hall of Justice.” Its subject was George Freeman, a convicted felon who briefly shared a jail cell with Ray Buckey in 1984. He testified at the preliminary hearing, and he also met with Wayne Satz at KABC to submit to a polygraph examination. (American courts do not admit the results of lie detector tests as evidence because of their inherent unreliability.) He said Ray admitted to molesting children at McMartin, even going into significant detail about the brand of lubricant he would use. He also said Buckey confirmed the allegations about pornography and interstate child prostitution. The whole McMartin family had been shooting videos and dropping kids off around the country since Ray was fourteen years old, according to Freeman. “Eyewitness News takes no position whatsoever,” Wayne Satz said on his evening broadcast, “as to whether George Freeman should be believed or disbelieved.”8