We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  To most of those who followed the trial during its six-year run, these arguments about media bias would have been familiar to the point of exhaustion or boredom. But they were completely new to the McMartin jurors. Having spent three years in a closely monitored state of information isolation, jurors could now return to their jobs, watch the local news, and read the morning paper. Many of them took advantage of their first opportunity to speak to the media—or to anyone at all, technically—about the case. An interviewer sat down with seven jury members and asked whether they thought that at least some of the children had been molested. All seven said yes—with qualifications. One juror said that although children “may” have been abused, he thought the prosecution failed to prove it. Another felt a little more confident that molestation had occurred somewhere, but she saw no really convincing evidence that abuse took place at the preschool. None of the jurors thought that any of the children intentionally lied on the stand, but they thought the CII interviews made it impossible to draw clear distinctions between obvious fantasies and more plausible allegations.

  More than anything else, the jurors said—more than the stories of satanic ritual abuse, more than the child witnesses’ shifting accounts of what happened—it was viewing the CII videotapes that compelled them to acquit Peggy on all charges and Ray on most of them. “I could not tell from watching the tape,” one juror said, “that the children were telling what actually happened to them, or if they were repeating what their parents told them.” Another said, “We never got the children’s story in their own words.” Overall, the group took a melancholy view of the trial. “I think everybody was a victim,” one said. “I don’t think anybody came out of this case better off than they were before.”42

  Jurors worried about readjusting to normal life after such a long time in court, but they were proud of their work and believed they had delivered a responsible verdict. The consensus around Los Angeles, however, and especially around Manhattan Beach, was rather different. Jurors fielded constant questions from relatives at home, friends at work, and even strangers in restaurants and cafés—how could they possibly have let the McMartin teachers go? Some of the conversations that ensued produced an understanding, but others ended angrily. Many people were still convinced of the Buckeys’ guilt. When one television station organized a call-in poll to gauge the public’s reaction, viewers asserted by a margin of seven-to-one that “justice was not served.”

  This anger reached one kind of apotheosis on a Saturday evening in late January when people began to gather outside the Manhattan Beach police station. The crowd included McMartin parents, new mothers pushing strollers, and local teenagers, and it had grown to more than five hundred people by the time it started marching through town. They carried signs and bumper stickers with various slogans about children on them. If anything, the verdicts strengthened the protesters’ sense of the horrors that had visited Manhattan Beach. “We have 1,400 disclosing children in this community,” one woman told a reporter from 60 Minutes. “1,400 children in this community have been ritualistically abused. Eight schools have been shut down. 1,400 children! I mean does that—doesn’t that hit you?”43

  Cyclists and people eating dinner at outdoor cafés and restaurants shouted words of support as the protesters worked their way down the Strand. One photograph shows marchers in short sleeves with the Pacific Ocean in the background. It looks like a beautiful evening. Aside from mobilizing and expressing the community’s free-floating anger, the march’s purpose was to cap off a letter-writing campaign designed to pressure Ira Reiner’s office into retrying Ray on the remaining thirteen undecided counts, but one speech given at the end of the march suggested that the parents’ relationship with the DA was beyond all saving. “The crime outside the courtroom,” one McMartin parent said, “was almost equaled by the crime inside the courtroom.”44

  Many people agreed that the system’s betrayal of those it was meant to protect was obvious. The jury’s failure to reach a guilty verdict on any of the sixty-five counts was, of course, painful enough on its own, but it was the trial’s extraordinary duration and expense that really made the acquittal sting. Had $15 million and more than six years of work really produced nothing of value or use? Developments elsewhere in the country began to give parents and prosecutors the impression that the trial’s net effect might actually have been counterproductive, at least in terms of society’s willingness to recognize and deal with instances of mass abuse in child care. The increased scrutiny now being directed toward ritual abuse investigations cast earlier convictions in a new light. In Kern County, California, six children recanted testimony they gave in the “Pitts ring” investigation and trial.45 An appeals court overturned seven convictions and threw out the more than twenty-five hundred years’ worth of prison sentences that went along with them on the grounds of serious prosecutorial misconduct. In El Paso, Michelle Noble and Gayle Dove had their guilty verdicts overturned. At conferences, therapists and detectives began to refer to their critics, who seemed to be gaining ground, as “the backlash.” They worried McMartin would come to be known as little more than a wasteful embarrassment.

  This assessment was too pessimistic by half. Caught up in their anxiety over a handful of judicial reversals in a handful of states, parents and their allies failed to recognize the continued influence of the powerful fears that made the trials possible to begin with. By 1990 the panic’s psychological roots ran deep, and their effects were still unfolding in Sacramento. In June state legislators put Proposition 115, the Crime Victims Justice Reform Act, to a statewide vote. The measure was approved by a fourteen-point margin, and it was a windfall for prosecutors, radically shifting the balance of power in California’s criminal justice system. Hearsay evidence became admissible under certain circumstances. Under this change the McMartin students would never have been compelled to testify nor, in all probability, would the jury have seen the CII videotapes; testimony from parents and therapists, relaying what they remembered the children saying to them, would have sufficed. The proposition also removed clauses from the state constitution that provided defendants indicted under a grand jury with the right to a preliminary hearing.

  After the verdict people had often cited McMartin’s eighteen-month preliminary hearing as evidence of the need for reform. But it is not at all clear that people other than prosecutors and their allies saw the McMartin hearing as a waste: it decreased the size of the case, both in terms of the number of defendants and the number of charges against them, by more than two-thirds. Had seven teachers gone to trial, the whole process may well have taken even longer, and it is also fair to say that without the preliminary hearing, guilty verdicts would have been more likely (certainly, at least, for Ray and his mother). The possibly unconscious assumption pushing these reforms into law was that the McMartin jury had come to the wrong verdict. The jurors themselves saw this very clearly, and they resented it. “Now that we found them not guilty, everyone wants to change the system,” one said. “If we had found them guilty, no one would have wanted to change anything.”46

  The same assumption lay at the bottom of an article Lois Timnick wrote for the Los Angeles Times about how McMartin prompted reforms within day care. Despite the “initial hysteria” that ripped through the South Bay, Timnick argued, the case had ultimately brought positive change to the child care industry. Whereas pre-McMartin facilities had been largely unregulated, most centers now subjected job applicants to criminal background checks, and some analyzed prospective teachers for personality traits thought by law enforcement to correspond with pedophilia. Other centers instituted policies ensuring that no adult teacher was ever left alone with a single child—a second teacher had to be in the room as well. “Good schools,” Timnick wrote, might also allow parents to secretly observe their children at day care via windows or one-way mirrors. The piece acknowledged studies demonstrating that children actually faced a far greater risk of abuse in the home than at day
care, but all of the reforms it praised were aimed, first, at easing parents’ largely unjustified anxieties and, second, at shielding day care workers from Ray Buckey’s fate. “We want to provide safeguards,” one Kentucky child care coordinator said, “and we don’t want to leave ourselves open to being accused.”47 Day care was being reformed as though the Buckeys had been found guilty.

  In any case, it turned out that the judiciary wasn’t quite done with Ray Buckey. Civil suits of all kinds threatened to keep courts occupied with the preschool for years, and two weeks after the verdict prosecutors announced that they would retry Buckey on the thirteen remaining counts. Buckey faced thirty-two years in prison. Jury selection began almost immediately.

  Speculation swirled about the political arithmetic behind the decision to stage another trial; Ira Reiner was engaged in a tough primary campaign for state attorney general, and the first McMartin verdict was just one in a series of recent high-profile courtroom defeats for the sitting city attorney. Everyone was angry. Ray Buckey went on Larry King and 60 Minutes, vowing to fight the charges to his dying breath.48 Judge Pounders appeared on Oprah to discuss the case, prompting defense attorneys to file motions asking that he not be allowed to preside over the retrial. And parents, still feeling disenchanted with the district attorney’s office and suspicious of its motives, decided to mount one last independent investigation.

  In the spring Danny Davis sold the McMartin Preschool building to a Manhattan Beach realtor named Arnold Goldstein, who planned to knock it down and put an office building in its place. A month or so before the demolition crew was scheduled to arrive, parents asked Goldstein for permission to excavate the grounds for a second time, which he granted. “I’m permitting these people to go on the property to find whatever they want and get it out of their system,” Goldstein said. “It would be nice if this would all die down.”49 Parents began by using a concrete saw to cut a rectangular hole in a classroom floor.

  The dig did not get McMartin out of the parents’ system; it just provided them with another opportunity to stage the anger that had been concentrated and re-energized by the twilight march through the streets of Manhattan Beach. Whereas their 1985 dig had been essentially haphazard and impulsive, they made what were at least cosmetic efforts to do things responsibly this time around. They hired a geologist and a photographer to document whatever they were to find, and they also brought in a professional to lead and supervise the whole endeavor. With a major judicial defeat on the books, though, the parents’ cause was perhaps a bit less respectable than it had previously been, and this seems to have nudged them toward extremism.

  Leading the dig was Ted Gunderson, a private investigator who had formerly been the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for the FBI. He grew distant from and then left the Bureau in the late eighties while cultivating an interest in the satanic menace (he appeared on the 1988 Geraldo Satanism special and talked about the devil worshippers’ supposedly sophisticated communication networks). By the time he came to Manhattan Beach he was an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist who gave lectures all across the United States. (Later he did a lot to publicize the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory, which holds that the government makes use of commercial airplanes to lace the atmosphere with harmful biological agents.) All indications are that he had a great time excavating McMartin. He posed for photographs displaying the haul of allegedly satanic artifacts retrieved from the site, and he struck up a romance with one of the McMartin mothers.50 That relationship was sadly not built to last—the woman later accused Gunderson of embezzling $30,000 from her.51

  An archaeologist named Gary Stickel produced a report on the dig’s results. (Reflecting the endlessly tangled politics of the ritual abuse panic, the publication of this report was funded in part by what Stickel described as “a generous donation from Gloria Steinem.”)52 The main lot measured approximately 115 by 35 feet, and the team also explored an adjacent lot of similar size. The hole carved out of the floor in the classroom produced wood chips, charcoal, ribbons, and some pieces of glass, concrete, and ceramic. When a professional mineral miner dug some two feet further down, he found large roots, fragments of wood, and what was catalogued as a “prehistoric Native American chert scraper.”53 On May 2 a backhoe rolled in and excavated a trench along the building’s west wall, uncovering what appeared to be garbage from the 1940s.

  Objects of more recent provenance were also discovered. Stickel saw two of these finds as particularly crucial. The first was a plastic bag with images of cartoon Disney characters on it, bearing the copyright date 1983. The second was a pair of metal clamps, whose manufacture could be dated to after the school’s construction, attached to some plumbing a couple of feet below ground near the outer wall. Unless there were tunnels providing some means of access, Stickel did not see a way for these objects to have ended up in the dirt. The entire building sat on a thick concrete slab, making it impossible to get at the school’s underground plumbing by going through the floor. (Stickel did not consider what this slab meant for the children’s stories of trap doors leading underground.) But Stickel also firmly believed the crew had discovered tunnels. Underneath two of the classrooms, excavators located what appeared to be filled-in areas leading out beyond the school’s walls. Remove the fill, Stickel wrote, and you had a tunnel large enough to accommodate adults with ease.

  Time constraints cut the dig short. Goldstein wasn’t willing to postpone the school’s demolition any further, so Stickel had to mark down some of his findings as inconclusive. But for the parents who cheered as bulldozers finally tore down the McMartin Preschool in late May, there was no doubt that tunnels had been there all along, waiting for someone committed enough to find them. That Memorial Day weekend was filled with news reports of the team’s discoveries, as Ted Gunderson gave interviews describing the dig.

  One of the few skeptical voices in the media was that of Paul Barron, a private investigator working for Danny Davis. He said bluntly that the “tunnels” were more likely a collection of old “shitholes.” Although he may have selected his words primarily for effect, they were also probably accurate. Property records show that a private home and garage sat on the preschool’s adjacent lot as early as 1928. Manhattan Beach was a rural area at the time, far from the center of Los Angeles and lacking city services. The absence of trash collection would be especially relevant here. The filled-in depressions were most likely old trash pits, a hypothesis strengthened by all the old rubbish found on the site. The presence of the two objects that postdated the school’s construction also has a benign explanation. The Disney bag found two feet underground near the school’s edge was probably brought there by some burrowing animal. As for the plumbing clamps, located at a similar shallow depth near the school’s edge, a plumber could have easily installed them by digging down from outside the building.54 None of these possibilities are considered in Stickel’s report, and well into the 1990s the existence of real tunnels underneath McMartin would remain an article of faith among a small, dedicated group.55

  The second McMartin trial began on May 7, and it was a miniaturized version of the original; everybody knew that nobody was going to tolerate another long proceeding. Because of two parents’ unwillingness to have their child testify for a second time, the number of charges against Ray had dropped to eight. A new judge, Stanley Weisberg, oversaw the case—Pounders had been let off following his Oprah appearance—and a new prosecutor was on hand to try it. Only three children testified, and the years separating them from the case’s origins had done their memories no favors. An eleven-year-old girl said that Ray took pictures of her in the nude, but she faltered when asked about the specific content of the charges against Ray. Did Ray put anything inside her vagina? “Not that I can remember,” she said, and she provided the same answer when asked about anal penetration.56 Astrid Heger testified again about the results of her medical examinations, but Kee MacFarlane’s role was very diminished. The prosecution wrapped up its
case and handed things over to the defense after only three weeks.

  From a distance, it looked very much like an ordinary criminal proceeding working to resolve an unusual but not outrageous set of allegations. It was only on the periphery that little events recalled the case’s colorful past. The old anxiety about a possible mistrial rose up again when Judge Weisberg had to excuse a juror after half an hour on the first day. The woman’s boat had caught fire over the weekend, and she could not stop coughing in the jury box. In Hermosa Beach the head minister at St. Cross Episcopal Church, the formerly alleged site of Ray Buckey’s black mass, announced he would seek disability retirement. He could no longer withstand the “extreme stress” caused by repeated episodes of vandalism and harassment. When Virginia McMartin took the stand, the new judge eventually had to ask her to refrain from embellishing answers with long harangues. She responded as she had in the past: “Oh, you’re not allowed freedom of speech in this court, either!”57

  There were many elements of the investigation that did not make an appearance at the second trial. Perhaps the most remarkable exclusion was that of the woman who started everything. Prosecutors, of course, had no desire to bring up Judy Johnson, whose alcoholism and mental illness were certain to work against the story they wanted to tell. Danny Davis did want to include Johnson as part of his arguments, but her son was not listed as a complainant on any of the remaining eight charges. The presiding judge refused to compel Matthew to testify, and so McMartin attained the further distinction of having lasted long enough to officially forget its origins. The McMartin II jury heard nothing about Judy Johnson. These and other constraints brought the defense’s presentation to a quick end. Courtroom officials originally promised a six-month trial, but the case was handed over to the jury on July 3, just three months after opening arguments. The jury deliberated for six hours a day. On July 15 the foreman informed Judge Weisberg that they were hopelessly deadlocked, favoring acquittal on six of the eight counts but completely unable to make further progress. Weisberg summoned jurors to the courtroom and asked each one whether he or she agreed with their foreman’s assessment. They did. “I don’t think you could ever get 12 people together who could make a unanimous decision on this,” said one jury member.58 Weisberg declared a mistrial, and one week later he presided over the McMartin case’s final criminal hearing. “The case of the People vs. Raymond Buckey is hereby dismissed, and the defendant is discharged,” he said. “All right, that’s it. That completes this case.”59