We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  Ofshe met Paul Ingram with the two lead investigators in the room. He asked Paul about his life—where he lived, what his childhood was like. Ofshe had been briefed about the vaguely cinematic qualities of Ingram’s abuse recollections, but he found that Paul’s memory seemed to function with no irregularities so long as the conversation was confined to everyday subjects. Though brought in for his cult expertise, Ofshe had also done work on false confessions in police interrogations, and he knew it was not uncommon for suspects to “admit” to crimes they could not remember so long as their interrogators provided assurances that the evidence against them was overwhelming. That Ingram was himself a cop doing everything he could to help his questioners could only have made this dynamic more powerful. Ofshe decided on the spot that Ingram, maliciously or not, was not telling the truth, and he tested his theory in the interrogation room with an improvised experiment.

  Without warning the other detectives, Ofshe told Paul that he had already spoken with Ericka and Paul Ross—which he had not—and that they had told him about an incident in which Paul made the pair have sex with each other so he could watch. Ingram said he could not remember any such incident, but Ofshe insisted, and the other detectives soon caught on and began to play along, specifying for Ingram the place in which the episode had occurred. Ingram assumed his meditative pose: head lowered, eyes closed. “I can kind of see Ericka and Paul Ross,” he said.49 Ofshe told Ingram to return to his cell for further reflection. The next day Ofshe visited Ingram again. Paul said he now had some clear memories, and Ofshe told him to keep thinking in his cell. When Ofshe visited for a third time Ingram handed him a written confession:

  Daytime: Probably Saturday or Sunday Afternoon. In Ericka’s Bedroom on Fir Tree. Bunk Beds set up. Ericka & Julie are sharing the room. I ask or tell Paul Jr. & Ericka to come upstairs & then we go into Ericka’s room. I close the door and tell them we are going to play (a game?).

  I tell them to undress. Ericka says “But Dad,” I say “Just get undressed and don’t argue.” From my tone or the way I say it, neither objects and they undress themselves. I’m probably blocking the door so they could not get out.

  What followed was a detached, pornographic description of Ingram’s children having sex with each other and with him, a father’s incest fantasy. Despite the rapid development of Paul’s memories, some details remained blurry. “I may have had anal sex with Paul,” he wrote. “Not real clear.” At the end of his confession Ingram described vague memories of a power dynamic that conformed to the cult-based theories of the investigation: “I believe that when I tell Paul & Ericka to come upstairs, those on the main floor who heard me and Paul & Ericka, knew what was going on and not to interrupt us. The ability to control Paul & Ericka may not come entirely from me. It seems there is a real fear of Jim or someone else. Someone may have told me to do this with the kids. This is a feeling I have.”50

  Ofshe was now almost sure that Paul’s confessions were false, and interviews with Ericka and Julie persuaded him that the girls’ satanic allegations were frantic attempts to resolve inconsistencies in a story and a situation that had gotten completely out of hand. He would have done well, though, to spend more time—which is to say, any time at all—on the planning stage of his experiment. As detectives noted at the time and as appeals courts and other critics would note later on, the scenario Ofshe proposed was not all that different from the scenes Paul had already been producing for months.51 With incest and group sex already on the table, brother-sister intercourse plus paternal voyeurism wasn’t exactly coming out of nowhere. Why couldn’t Ofshe have picked a wilder story or, better yet, a story involving some easily falsifiable element, like airline travel? Although the experiment certainly contributed to the mountain of evidence suggesting that Ingram’s claims were not actual memories but anguished fantasies produced under intense pressure, it did not discredit the prosecution’s case as swiftly or decisively as it probably should have.

  After reading over Ingram’s confession, Ofshe confronted him with the truth. Ingram wouldn’t budge. Again and again Ofshe tried to explain that he had made up the scene on the fly, but Ingram countered that the memories he had recovered during his two days of jail cell reflection and prayer were “just as real to [him] as anything else,” a claim that makes perfect sense. Ingram built the memory-generating machine inside himself at great personal cost, and it is not surprising that he would have been so reluctant to relinquish its benefits. It allowed him to say and believe that his daughters always told the truth no matter how crazy their stories became—by confessing his crimes, Ingram was now protecting his children, even if he had betrayed them for years. Ingram’s memories also provided him with an elegant solution to the problem of how to be a good cop while being interrogated by cops. That his family and his workplace somehow accidentally conspired to incarcerate him for decades did not weaken Ingram’s identification with either institution. He pled guilty and was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  Ingram was well suited to prison, itself an environment structured around deference to authority. He managed the inmates’ library, and as the time separating him from his sessions in the interrogation room grew, he found himself becoming less certain of the memories he had produced in Olympia. He became sufficiently certain of his innocence that he tried to appeal his conviction. In 1993, still in prison, he told the journalist Lawrence Wright, whose book Remembering Satan remains the definitive account of the case, that feelings of guilt about his parenting made his confessions possible. He had slapped Julie once when she ran a hot bath that scalded her brother, and there was also an instance when he hit Paul Ross on the back of the head. “I wasn’t there for the kids,” he said. “I wasn’t able to communicate with them as I should have. I never sexually abused anybody. But emotional abuse—you don’t like to admit it, but somebody has to.”52

  “Is that all?” Lawrence Wright wrote at the end of his book on the Ingram case. “Certainly that would be the most frightening conclusion of the Ingram case, that the bonds of family life are so intricately framed that such appalling perversions of memory can arise from ordinary rotten behavior.”53 Working to at least partially resolve some of the many open questions that remained after Paul went to prison, Wright noted that both of the Ingram daughters had talked about having sex with their brothers from the investigation’s earliest days. He also noted that investigators had not pursued this line of inquiry at all, presumably because of their assumption that any sexual activity among the siblings “must have been learned” from the abusive parents. Of course, by the time Wright began the reporting for his book, the Ingrams’s stories had changed so many times and for so many reasons that pinning down the final truth of what happened to their family seemed hopeless.

  In 1990 Paul Ingram was moved to a prison in Delaware, and he found conditions there to be “relatively easy.”54 While Ingram served out his time, two other members of his family appeared on television. Ericka appeared on Sally Jessy Raphael and said she had been given a ritual abortion. “The baby was still alive when they took it out,” she said, “and they put it on top of me and then they cut it up.”55 The broadcast actually helped Paul. Many of his fellow inmates watched the show, and the consensus among them was that Ericka was lying. Another news program tracked down a relative whose involvement in the case was otherwise very limited: Paul Ingram’s father, Ross. When asked about his son’s susceptibility to hypnosis, Ross said that it had been evident from a very early age. He also said that he had been the one doing the hypnotizing:

  When Paul was probably 10, 12 years old, I’d learned hypnotism. And so I would hypnotize the children to get better grades in school, be kind and courteous, and to listen to what other people had to say, and always be helpful. Paul was real easy to hypnotize. I would tell the kids to set back and relax, get comfortable, close their eyes, and just imagine that it would be a nice white cloud floating overhead. Just to imagine they were riding on that cloud
without a worry in the world.56

  As a child and as a young man, Paul had been tormented by his father’s emotional distance, and as an adult and father he had maintained a similar emotional distance from his own children. But Paul’s experiences with the pastor and the police detectives in the interrogation room suggest that he took his father’s lessons about helpfulness and listening to what other people had to say very much to heart. When he tried to live up to his familial and professional obligations in his jail cell by closing his eyes, taking a deep breath, and—in his own words, and his father’s—floating off “on a white cloud,” Paul may have simply been trying to be a good boy.

  Or maybe not. Today Ingram has no recollection of ever being hypnotized by his father. “I remember reading about it, and after that my father did state he did it, but I don’t recall it ever happening,” he wrote after being released from prison. “I do recall that my father tried a hypnotizing treatment to stop his smoking addiction, but it never worked for him.”57

  Chapter 8

  McMartin—The Verdict

  Danny Davis spent several thousand dollars to spruce up the McMartin Preschool in the spring of 1989. Defense staff and Peggy McMartin Buckey’s husband, Chuck, applied fresh coats of paint inside and out, restoring the building to its original pea-green color and brightening the school’s handmade clown cabinets, giraffe chairs, and other furniture. Davis owned the building now. The McMartin-Buckeys had signed it over as partial payment for their legal fees. After the restoration Davis asked a staff member with a video camera to walk through the building and document the changes.1 Except for the absent teachers and children, it looked much the same as in the fall of 1983. In the video the cameraman wanders from room to room. There is a stack of green cots pushed up against the wall. Everything seems to be in order. Only the broken climbing toy outside in the yard suggests the school’s more recent history of vandalism and arson, which damaged the property’s shrubs and trees in addition to the building itself. Davis restored those too, hiring a plant rental nursery that usually did work for television and film productions. Workers installed potted plants, wired fake branches onto those trees that had survived, and planted artificial junipers, oaks, and Chinese elms in the ground.2 Judge Pounders’s subsequent tour of the property convinced him that Davis had produced an accurate facsimile of the school as it appeared in the early 1980s. He granted Davis’s request to allow the jury to see it for themselves.

  Davis believed jurors needed to see just how small the building was to understand the implausibility of the stories that had been told about the defendants, so the City of Los Angeles bused them down to Manhattan Beach on a sunny Wednesday morning in April. Reporters were told to keep their distance, so they photographed the event from the other side of busy Manhattan Beach Boulevard while jurors toured the school in silence. Anyone who wanted to ask a question had to make a hand signal first so that Judge Pounders and the attorneys could scurry over, supervise, and raise objections if necessary. A few jurors timed the walk from the playground entrance to the building itself. Others got approval to shout from one room to another so that they could hear how noise carried. They looked into the school’s closets and bathrooms, and they also looked at the property from the balcony of an apartment building across the street. They left a little more than an hour after they had arrived, and then the reporters were allowed to tour the school. One journalist climbed onto a piece of playground equipment that said FORT ISSIMO on the side, testing whether a child could have served as a “lookout” from the perch. Others looked around for the “secret room” to which one child said he had been taken.3 The following day McMartin surpassed the Hillside Strangler case to become the longest criminal trial in American history.

  The McMartin children and their parents had already testified. So had Kee MacFarlane, Astrid Heger, Bruce Woodling, and a host of medical experts. The summer was given over largely to testimony from those who had actually worked at the school. Betty Raidor took the stand for eight days. A sixty-nine-year-old disciplinarian, she criticized Ray as an “incompetent” teacher who let the children run around noisily when he should have been organizing activities instead. She said she never saw anything at McMartin that suggested sexual abuse. Charles Buckey took the stand and fielded humorous softball questions from Danny Davis about his family’s alleged involvement in child porn. “During the time that you and your wife operated the preschool,” Davis asked, “did you receive large sums of money from the worldwide sale of child pornography?”

  “No,” Buckey said.

  “From 1979 to 1983 did you and your wife come into huge amounts of money from unknown sources?”

  “No.”4

  Babette Spitler took the stand and talked about the two years she spent trying to recover her own children from Los Angeles County’s child protective services following her arrest. In May, Peggy McMartin Buckey testified that she had been molested as a child (a neighbor put his hand up her shirt), but she disputed the prosecution’s claim that she had told McMartin parents the molestation was not a “big deal.”5 So much attention had been focused on the preschool’s lone male teacher for so long that it was sometimes possible to forget that Peggy still faced charges herself. She sat quietly at the defense table, and she gave few interviews. Prosecutors questioned Peggy about her impressions of Ray. She said he was a shy and somewhat aimless young man, and she talked about his problems with alcohol and occasional marijuana use. She had once asked her son to speak with a church counselor about his lack of direction. Prosecutors stated that Ray had sought counseling for his problems with molesting children, but the minister who actually provided the counseling said there was “not a word of truth” to the allegation.6

  The month she first testified, Peggy put two smiling bear stickers on a small memo pad and began to write. During recess breaks, sidebar conversations among the attorneys, and the other stretches of idle time that are a regular feature of any trial, she was writing. Raised a Christian Scientist by her mother, Virginia, Peggy’s faith had intensified in the years following her arrest. She once told her attorney, Dean Gits, that she believed God had brought him to her in jail, and in the spring of 1989 she wrote down short prayers and bits of Scripture in her memo pad.7 “Lord remind me that nothing is going to happen to me today that you & I can’t handle together,” the first one read. “God doesn’t take you half the way, he takes you all the way,” was the second. She encouraged herself to “be gentle, be loving.” When encouragement wasn’t enough, her notes took the form of mild admonishments—she once simply wrote “golden rule” in the corner of a page. Peggy had a harder time in jail and in court than did her son. She was constantly preoccupied by her plight, and she became somewhat paranoid. She wrote down lines from Psalm 19, and she focused on different words and phrases from day to day. One page includes various meditations on gratitude, and another deals with love: “Love is the liberator,” “Love never loses sight of loveliness,” and “Love must triumph over hate.”8 She used the notepad to keep on an even keel.

  When Peggy took the witness stand she began to write out a list with the heading “Grateful For.” She started out by listing standard virtues, each on its own line. First came “God,” then “Life,” then “Truth,” “Love,” and “Joy.” But Peggy was on the stand for a long time, and the list grew. In items 32 through 101 she wrote out the first names of people she knew. Then she listed features of the natural world: “112. Sand, 113. Dirt, 114. Seeds, 115. Fog.” Entries indicating gratitude for “Surf boards” and “Trucks” followed, and so did “Motels” and “Hospitals.” She made it through “437. Freedom of speech,” “568. Legs,” and “588. Watering Can,” before she ended the list at item number 598, “Beauty Shop.” When her testimony ended, she set the notepad aside for the time being.

  Ray Buckey spoke in front of a jury for the first time in July. Prosecutors spent much of his time there trying to determine, all the other evidence notwi
thstanding, whether he was the kind of weirdo who would molest children, given the chance. He spent hours answering questions about his habit of not wearing anything underneath his board shorts, and attorneys for both sides wanted to know why he had been spotted wearing a wire pyramid on his head while driving around Manhattan Beach in the early eighties. As it turned out, Ray had a good explanation for that, if also an odd one. In 1976 two writers, one of them an astrologer, claimed in their book Pyramid Power that ancient Egyptians had used the structures to store mystical energy that improved health and preserved food. Some people who felt this energy for themselves, the authors wrote, “were so energized that they could not cope with the dynamo effects they experienced.”9 Ray only wore the pyramid hat in his car when he felt he needed an extra boost for the day; normally he just slept beneath the pyramid that hung over his bed. “It was supposedly to help me sleep,” he told Danny Davis on the stand. “Just the effect of a pyramid supposedly from what I had read and experimented with it, it either helped me sleep or was a great placebo.”10