We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  George Freeman probably didn’t represent too much of a threat at the upcoming trial. He had multiple convictions preceding his time in jail with Ray Buckey as well as charges pending from arrests that took place after the preliminary hearing. But Freeman was only one of seven informants preparing to testify against Buckey—the Easy Reader’s story was not about Freeman in particular but rather the DA’s informant program as a whole. Cody identified a number of cases, mostly gang and drug related, in which LA prosecutors won convictions solely on the strength of informants’ eyewitness testimony. Some of these informants, he noted, had testified in as many as ten separate cases, making them ostensible witnesses to a really extraordinary number of violent crimes. In Ray Buckey’s early days in jail, prisoners who worked as informants were cycled through his cell in such quick succession that Danny Davis asked him to carry a sign around the jail: “I do not talk or listen to other inmates.”9 For the informants themselves, one public defender told Cody, fabricating confessions had become something like a legal means of last resort, the only way to make any kind of progress with their own charges. “The name of the game in county jail is to be an informant,” the attorney said. “It seems if you want to get any type of action on your own case you become an informant.”10 Another attorney said the problem became especially acute in cases that were already receiving lots of media attention. “I don’t think it’s possible to have a client in county jail in a high publicity case without having informants come forward,” he said. “If you taped his mouth shut you’d have informants saying he confessed in sign [language] or in a note.”11

  Cody documented Lael Rubin’s repeated use of jailhouse informants in her work. In the last case she prosecuted before taking on McMartin she asked a multiple child murderer named Manuel Cortez to testify at the preliminary hearing of a man charged with the murder of a diplomat at the Turkish consulate in Los Angeles. Cortez’s testimony was the prosecution’s only evidence that the murder had been politically motivated, and when he suddenly vowed to rescind his statement if asked to testify at trial, other informants were quickly rotated in to take his place. Some attorneys wondered why, if the district attorney’s office really believed these defendants were so quick to talk about their crimes in jail, they bothered trying to wrangle this endless procession of unreliable criminals. There were other, perfectly legal ways of monitoring prisoners’ conversations: “If the DA wants to know what a defendant really said,” Forrest Latiner, Peggy Ann’s attorney, asked, “why doesn’t he get a court order to bug the cell?” In fact, the DA had obtained a secret order to record conversations between Ray and his mother as they were shuttled around in police cars to view the CII tapes with their lawyers. Rubin told Cody that any evidence obtained from those recordings would be presented at Ray’s trial. None ever was.

  One article of faith among those who supported the prosecution in child care abuse and sex ring investigations was that these cases had come out of nowhere. That such violence could be committed in such loving communities for so long seemed unreal and impossible. This partly explains why parents put so much emphasis on belief when they talked about the allegations. A certain blind faith was needed to bridge the gap that separated parents’ memories and experiences of ordinary life from the horror stories that now occupied so much of their time. Without this faith, even those who thought all of the McMartin teachers were guilty had no way of understanding what had happened.

  Cody’s cover story, then, wasn’t only important because of the light it threw on George Freeman’s testimony; it also demystified McMartin by explaining how a small but very concrete element of the trial had come to be. It showed how a familiar institution—the same institution that handled robbery, drunk driving, and other common crimes—had contributed to a narrative that bordered on the supernatural. The informant program was such a well-established part of how criminal law worked in Los Angeles that workers in the DA’s office informally referred to one county jail employee as the “snitch liaison,” phoning him up when they needed someone to be housed next to an arriving inmate. The Easy Reader made McMartin seem less exceptional, more like other cases, more like other instances of prosecutorial overreach. This made McMartin easier to criticize in other ways too.

  Parents responded to this growing skepticism quickly, though not always productively. In late spring two groups called Affirming Children’s Truth (ACT) and We Believe the Children held a meeting to denounce society’s denial of child sexual abuse. Some one hundred parents gathered at the Manhattan Beach Country Club and listened as Roland Summit argued that “it is hard to find parallels for our society’s indifference to what happened to your children.” Summit talked a little about Freud and the seduction theory, and then he gave what he thought was the appropriate analogy: “The parallel that comes to mind is Germany’s treatment of its Jews during World War II.” Another father mentioned war crimes. “Denial, cover-up, shifting of blame—the comparisons to My Lai are scary,” he said. John Jackson, author of the defunct “McMartin Watch” column, was there, and so was Jan Hollingsworth, whose book Unspeakable Acts would serve for years as the definitive pro-prosecution account of the Country Walk case.12 Jackson told the audience that skepticism had to be taken seriously and countered in public. “Public opinion, not the law, will be the deciding factor in the McMartin case,” he said. “As custodians of your children’s truth you must mobilize public opinion.”13

  Jury selection began in April 1987. Parents stood in the back of the courtroom with signs that read “I BELIEVE THE CHILDREN” as trial Judge William Pounders worked his way through a pool of five hundred potential jurors. Prosecutors and defense attorneys eventually agreed on seven men and five women. In the opening statement she delivered on July 13, Lael Rubin told those jurors to pay attention to the child witnesses. “You will need to listen to them,” she said. “They have gone through a long and difficult process of disclosure, of retrieving, recognizing and recalling events of the past.”14 In the opening statement he delivered the following day, Dean Gits, Peggy McMartin Buckey’s attorney, walked the jury through some of what had occurred during the previous three years. “There were 22 people employed on a full-time basis with the sheriff’s task force in order to investigate other suspects connected with the McMartin Preschool,” he said.15 Gits added that he did not and probably never would know how many FBI agents had contributed to the investigation, “but we do know that as many as seven different FBI agents were working full-time on the case.” What did all those people spend all that time doing?

  They searched 21 residences, seven businesses—when I say seven businesses, understand that that’s seven. . . . They searched 37 cars and three motorcycles and one farm. And they searched for all these things here: child pornography, nude pictures of students, records, diaries, et cetera, evidence of mutilated or dead animals, bank account records, evidence of scientific analysis and hidden wall and floor safes. Those were some of the things that they were investigating. They also interviewed a lot of people. . . . At least 450 children were interviewed and probably a minimum of 150 adults.16

  What else? “There were a total of 49 photo lineups that were shown,” Gits said. “Presumably, unless the police department was making up suspects, somebody had pointed to each one of the persons in the 49 photo lineups.” In addition, eighty-two separate locations, including four churches, “two food markets, two car washes, two airports, one photography studio, one exercise club, and one national park” had been searched. From the preschool police had seized twenty blankets, twelve items of children’s clothing, nine rags, four towels, sheets, underpants, sponge mops, spiral notebooks, and soil samples.17 They reviewed customs records, real estate filings, and utility records, and they sifted through thousands of pornographic images. This search, Gits said, had turned up no corroborative evidence whatsoever. “So we believe the money spent was well worth it,” he said.18

  Gits was able to make a few brief, sarcastic reference
s to the satanic allegations because it is during the opening and closing statements that attorneys enjoy the most rhetorical freedom. The interactions between attorneys and witnesses that make up the majority of a criminal trial, however, are bound by a much narrower set of guidelines. In dropping charges against five of the seven McMartin defendants, Ira Reiner had also dropped the charges associated with those child witnesses whose testimony had provoked so much controversy during the preliminary hearing. Of the hundreds of children interviewed at CII, only thirteen were scheduled to testify at trial, and prosecutors intended to be much more careful about the kinds of testimony they solicited from these witnesses. It was important to avoid any more headlines about Chuck Norris’s participation in satanic rites. As one report noted, a case that had originally made headlines as the “crime of the century” was now being presented as a “vanilla 288(a),” meaning, simply, “lewd and lascivious acts on a child under 14 years of age.”19

  Dropping these charges allowed prosecutors to avoid talking about some of the work they had been occupied with during the previous three years. With few exceptions, an attorney may only ask a witness about charges that directly pertain to that witness, meaning that much of the substance of the McMartin investigation would make no appearance at the trial. On the one hand, it is definitely better to be charged with molesting thirteen children than to be charged with molesting twenty or four hundred of them. On the other hand, the prosecution’s lean new charging document meant the jury would not hear much of the information that made the McMartin investigation intelligible, that it would be insulated to the greatest possible extent from the skepticism that was beginning to circulate more freely in Los Angeles. A trial is a world of its own, and this is good and appropriate for the law but not so good for some other things.

  The trial settled into a rhythm. One by one, each of the prosecution’s complaining child witnesses testified, with parents appearing afterward to talk about nightmares and behavioral changes. One child told Rubin about being made to play naked movie star. “Did you hear anything that led you to believe that someone was taking pictures?” Rubin asked.

  “Yes,” the girl said. “Clicking.” She and her classmates “assumed there were cameras,” she said, and even though she never saw a person actually taking photographs during the naked game, she “could just see the lens sometimes.”20 The child said in a straightforward way that Ray had told her to remove her clothes, but much else in her testimony had a slight tinge of unreality, of being able to see the lens but not the person wielding it or of “assuming” there were cameras as opposed to seeing that there were cameras. Her description of Ray’s threats had a similar dreamlike quality. After naked movie star, she said, Ray came into the classroom with a cat:

  Q: What, if anything, did Ray do with the cat when he came in the classroom with it?

  A: Well, he like brought it in and, like, on top of a paper bag, and he, umm, he just put it down on the table.

  Q: Did Ray say anything about the cat?

  A: No. But it was dead. And then he cut it in the side.21

  The child also provided the standard recovered memory explanation for her initial denials. “It was, like, so far back in my mind,” she said of the memories, “and it was starting to come forward, but I did not want it to.” Rubin asked her why not. “Because it was, like, really scary and embarrassing.”22

  Many days were spent on the medical evidence. Astrid Heger and the other doctors who examined the children in 1983 and 1984 had used colposcopes to take photographs of the McMartin students’ genitals and anuses, and now these slides were projected onto a screen in the courtroom. On direct examination expert witnesses for the prosecution said the giant, magnified anuses were “significantly deformed.”23 Then, on cross-examination, Danny Davis would show these witnesses slides they had not previously consulted and ask them to identify irregularities. The witnesses rarely picked out the same irregularities. These exchanges were very repetitive. Two journalists named Paul and Shirley Eberle attended almost every day of the trial, and the hours they spent staring at the colposcopic slides seem to have marked them in ways that other aspects of the case did not. Listening to the lawyers discuss the hundreds of slides that were to be presented in the coming months, they recorded a lawyer sitting next to them as saying, “I wonder who are the real pornographers in this thing.”24 That is a bit of a cheap shot, but it is true that no other photographs of the McMartin children’s genitals were ever found. Later, sitting quietly and staring yet again at a “blazing giant anus,” a friend sat down next to them. “I see it’s Anus Awareness Week again,” she said.25

  People can get used to almost any job, though. It wasn’t more than a few months into the trial that Judge Pounders noticed that some of the jurors were not listening very diligently. He admonished one juror for his consistent late arrivals by accusing him of wasting taxpayer funds: “Just for the cost of this courtroom and the court staff—that doesn’t have anything to do with the attorneys or their staffs—it costs us $7.70 a minute to keep this courtroom open.”26 Even when they did show up, it became difficult to keep some of the jurors awake. “I think we may have a problem with the jurors sleeping during the proceedings,” Danny Davis told Judge Pounders one morning. “Enough people have brought this information to me that I felt it necessary to bring it to your attention.”27 Judge Pounders brought the jury into the courtroom and admonished them, as he would do many times in the future.

  Outside the courtroom and outside Los Angeles, the struggle to mobilize public opinion intensified. Ellen Willis was a radical feminist writer and editor at the Village Voice in New York when she watched the 60 Minutes report on McMartin. At the time, the Voice had national reach and regularly published investigative pieces on stories from around the country. Willis called Debbie Nathan, a journalist living in El Paso, Texas, and asked whether she would travel to Manhattan Beach and do some reporting. Nathan had a small child at the time and couldn’t go, but as it happened, juries had recently convicted two former child care workers at El Paso’s East Valley YMCA of abusing, raping, and photographing children. Gayle Stickler Dove, who was thirty-one years old when police arrested her at a Halloween party in 1985, received three life sentences plus 60 years. Michelle “Mickey” Noble turned herself in the day after Dove was arrested. She received a life sentence plus 311 years. Willis told Nathan she could look into that case instead.

  These trials seemed to take on slightly more than their fair share of local color. If professional screenwriters could have a material influence on a day care trial that originated just twenty minutes south of Hollywood, then of course Michelle Noble in El Paso could have her trial overseen by a judge who referred to himself as a “cowboy” and also talked like one, saying once of the trial’s enormous cost, “It ain’t nothing new in the world. Justice runs high.”28 That said, there wasn’t much that happened in El Paso that hadn’t already happened in Bakersfield, Miami, or Jordan. A mother and father called the police after becoming convinced that somebody was molesting their son during his morning sessions at the YMCA. A detective and a social worker were called in to conduct interviews, which initially produced almost no useful testimony (the children were three and four years old). The social worker and the detective kept trying. Soon Noble and Dove were accused of driving the children to Noble’s house, allowing them to be raped by unknown men, and forcing them to urinate and defecate while they made videos. Parents formed a support group called HELP, which stood for “Help Educate Little People,” and they met every Wednesday to talk about new developments.29 Dove and Noble were tried separately by Assistant District Attorney Debra Kanof, who called their alleged crimes “a murder of childhood, a murder of innocence.”30

  Kanof and her team benefited enormously from the investigations that preceded their own. The prosecutor said she knew El Paso had its own McMartin from the minute she saw the reports on the first boy to have alleged abuse. She kept in touch wi
th Kee MacFarlane, whose work she admired. She responded to people who thought the child interviews were unreliable by talking about Freud betraying his “hysterics” in the nineteenth century.31 When Marina Gallardo, the social worker, was confronted about her interviewing technique in court, she admitted that she had erred, describing a video of one of her own sessions as “one of the worst leading and suggestive interviews that I have ever witnessed.”32 She then fell back on an excuse previously used by Kee MacFarlane, saying, “I didn’t care about the legal aspects of the case. I just wanted to get the truth out.”33 When asked about a child who recanted all of his allegations when interviewed in front of a video camera, she talked in the vocabulary of Summit’s Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, claiming such reversals were common products of a child’s desire to forget.34

  They also benefited from legislation that others had pioneered. As Debbie Nathan finally reported in the Voice in the late summer of 1987, bills passed in 1983 made it possible for video of the child interviews in El Paso to be presented in court in lieu of the testifying children themselves. This was a coup for the prosecutors. Parents are widely seen as the people best able to understand and interpret their children’s needs and moods, and nobody expects them to videotape family conversations or adhere to a rigid set of interviewing protocols. Watching mothers and fathers take the witness stand, one after the other, and dissolve into anguished sobs just minutes into their testimony must also have been powerful. Nathan wrote that “because the parents were supposed to speak for their children, they tended to use baby talk, a style soon adopted by everyone from prosecuting attorneys to the press.”35 Lawyers had already made and distributed photographs of Michelle Noble’s breasts to prove she had scars from a breast reduction surgery two years prior (despite claiming that they had been made to suck on Noble’s breasts, none of the children mentioned the scars), and now Noble had to listen as parents and then prosecutors began to refer to her by the alliterative nickname her kids had used at the Y, “Miss Mickey.”36 One father, a retired police officer, imitated his child’s inflection, tone, and vocabulary on the stand. Afterward he described his experience as cathartic. “I tried to be my son,” he said. “I wanted to bring it out just like he told me. I wanted to feel like I felt when he was telling me.”37