by Richard Beck
* A pseudonym. The names of people and places associated with her case have been changed at her request, to protect her privacy.
Acknowledgments
My work on this book began in fall 2011 and continues up to the present, as I sit at a desk writing acknowledgments. The people listed here helped me with many aspects of research, writing, and editing. They all have my gratitude.
Thank you to the members of the n+1 Research Collective: Christopher Glazek, Mark Greif, Elizabeth Gumport, Simone Landon, Nika Mavrody, Kathleen Ross, Erin Sheehy, Astra Taylor, and Dayna Tortorici. This book comes directly out of the work we did together and would not exist without it.
The following people and institutions provided me with access to many of the research materials on which this book is based: Ross E. Cheit, Kevin Cody, Danny Davis, Debbie Nathan, Michael Snedeker, Hollida Wakefield, James Michael Wood, the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives at Miami Dade College, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and the Scott County Historical Society. Archival research was also made possible by a Research Support Grant from the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Book research requires money, but book advances are small, and fellowship applications sometimes do not bear fruit. I want to emphasize the positive feelings I have for the people who gave me places to stay, often for free. They are Jake Galgon, Laura Jereski, Susan Laxton, Johanna Ojeda, James Pogue, Robert Andrew Powell, and Peter Valelly.
Thank you to everyone who read drafts of the manuscript and offered comments, advice, edits, and encouragement, especially Jesse Barron, Lois Beckett, Keith Gessen, Benjamin Kunkel, Rachel Riederer, and my editor, Brandon Proia.
I am grateful to Madeleine Schwartz for all kinds of things.
Jim Rutman, of Sterling Lord Literistic, is a terrific agent. Clive Priddle and everyone else at PublicAffairs have been a pleasure to work with, and the staff and writers of n+1 are a source of constant support and delight. Thanks also to my family and friends for everything.
—RB, March 5, 2015
Notes
Introduction
1. Wayne Satz, Eyewitness News, KABC, Los Angeles, February 2, 1984.
2. Wayne Satz, Eyewitness News, KABC, Los Angeles, Videotape “#1—Satz 1 and 2,” in the possession of Danny Davis.
3. John Crewdson, By Silence Betrayed: Sexual Abuse of Children in America (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1988), 140.
4. Laura M. Betancourt et al., “Adolescents with and without Gestational Cocaine Exposure: Longitudinal Analysis of Inhibitory Control, Memory and Receptive Language,” Neurotoxicology and Teratology 33, no. 1 (January–February 2011): 36–46.
5. Statement of Hon. Arlen Specter, Chair, Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, Child Sexual Abuse Victims in the Courts: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, May 22, 1984.
6. Paul McEnroe and David Peterson, “Jordan,” Minneapolis Star and Tribune, October 21, 1984, 18A.
7. Statement of Kee MacFarlane, Child Sexual Abuse Victims in the Courts, US Senate.
8. “Fuster, Frank” [video recording], Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives, Accession/Request No. 1194-005, 1985.
9. Jan Hollingsworth, Unspeakable Acts (New York and Chicago: Congdon and Weed, 1986), 544.
10. “The Best Kept Secret,” 20/20, ABC, June 14, 1984.
11. Peter W. Kunhardt and Kenneth Wooden, producers, “Why the Silence?” 20/20, ABC, January 3, 1985.
12. “The Best Kept Secret.”
13. Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck, Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1999), 10.
14. Kevin Cody, “Boy Testifies to Complex Abusive Acts at McMartin,” Easy Reader, April 21, 1988, 11.
15. Interview with Jason Cramer (pseud.), August 28, 1984, Interviewers Laurie Braga and Joe Braga, transcribed by Laurie Alvarado on September 17, 1984.
16. Roland Summit, “Caring for Child Molestation Victims,” National Symposium on Child Molestation (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 1984), 242.
17. “Wee Care Interview,” June 28, 1985, transcript, Office of the Prosecutor of Essex County, Interviewer Lou Fonolleras, 134.
18. Ibid., 136.
19. Ibid., 142.
20. Gilbert Cates, director, Do You Know the Muffin Man?, produced by Daniel Freudenberger, Avnet/Kerner Company Productions, 1989.
21. CII interview with Jessie Lipton (pseud.), August 16, 1984, Interviewer Laurie Braga, transcribed by Cristina Bejarano, April 1, 1996, 14.
22. CII interview with Otis Lawton (pseud.), November 1983, transcript, interviewer Kee MacFarlane, 53.
23. Ibid., 71.
24. CII interview with Keith Doherty (pseud.), January 24, 1984, transcript, interviewers Kee MacFarlane and Sandra Krebs, 35.
25. Paul McEnroe, Dan Oberdorfer, and Cheryl Johnson, “Sources Suggest Link to Stories of Child Slayings,” Minneapolis Star and Tribune, October 16, 1984, 15A.
26. Letter from We the Jurors, State of Florida vs. Bobby Fijnje, to Janet Reno, May 9, 1991, on “Frontline: The Child Terror,” www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/cases/fijnjeletter.html.
27. John A. Jackson, “McMartin Watch,” Easy Reader, May 2, 1985, 5.
28. Advertisement placed by “The Friends of The McMartin Pre-School Defendants,” Easy Reader, August 15, 1985, 13.
29. Ceci and Bruck, Jeopardy in the Courtroom, 8.
30. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 30.
31. Ibid., 24.
32. Ibid., 13.
33. Ibid., 5.
34. Richard Francis, Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 181–182.
35. Menachem Kaiser, “Panic in Jerusalem,” Tablet, November 29, 2012, www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/117839/panic-in-jerusalem.
36. M. S. Denov, “The Myth of Innocence: Sexual Scripts and the Recognition of Child Sexual Abuse by Female Perpetrators,” Journal of Sex Research 40, no. 3 (2003): 303–314.
37. Greg Allen, “Sex Offenders Forced to Live Under Miami Bridge,” NPR.org, May 20, 2009, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104150499.
38. Minnesota Department of Corrections, “Residential Proximity and Sex Offense Recidivism in Minnesota,” April 2007, www.csom.org/pubs/MN%20Residence%20Restrictions_04-07SexOffenderReport-Proximity%20MN.pdf.
39. Human Rights Watch, “No Easy Answers: Sex Offender Laws in the US,” vol. 19, no. 4(G) (September 2007), 28, www.hrw.org/reports/2007/09/11/no-easy-answers.
Chapter 1
1. Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 56.
2. Lela B. Costin, The Politics of Child Abuse in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 67.
3. Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child, 56.
4. Ibid., 60.
5. John Caffey, “Multiple Fractures in the Long Bones of Infants Suffering from Chronic Subdural Hematoma,” American Journal of Roentgenology 56 (1946): 163–173.
6. John Caffey, “Infantile Cortical Hyperostoses,” Journal of Pediatrics 29, no. 5 (November 1946): 541–559.
7. Caffey, “Multiple Fractures in the Long Bones of Infants Suffering from Chronic Subdural Hematoma.”
8. F. N. Silverman, “The Roentgen Manifestations of Unrecognized Skeletal Trauma in Infants,” American Journal of Roentgenology, Radium Therapy and Nuclear Medicine 69 (1953): 413–427.
9. V. Woolley and W. A. Evans, “Significance of Skeletal Lesions in
Infants Resembling Those of Traumatic Origin,” Journal of the American Medical Association 158 (1955): 539–543.
10. John Caffey, “Some Traumatic Lesions in Growing Bones Other Than Fractures and Dislocations—Clinical and Radiological Features,” British Journal of Radiology 30 (1957): 225–238.
11. C. Henry Kempe et al., “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” Journal of the American Medical Association 181, no. 1 (July 7, 1962): 17–24.
12. C. Henry Kempe et al., “Editorial,” Journal of the American Medical Association 181, no. 1 (July 7, 1962): 42.
13. Barbara Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse: Political Agenda Setting for Social Problems (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 59.
14. Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child, 62.
15. Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse, 56.
16. Marjorie Hunter, “U.S. to Press Ban on Child-Beating; Health Unit Drafts ‘Model’ Act for States to Use,” New York Times, May 26, 1963, 95.
17. Charles Flato, “Parents Who Beat Children: A Tragic Increase in Cases of Child Abuse Is Prompting a Hunt for Ways to Select Sick Adults Who Commit Such Crimes,” Saturday Evening Post, October 6, 1962, 32–35.
18. Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse, 4.
19. Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child, 66.
20. Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 2000), 202.
21. Florence Rush, The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Tab Books, 1980), 14.
22. Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse, 102–103.
23. Text of President Nixon’s veto message of the Child Development Act of 1971, Congressional Record, 10 December 1971, 46059.
24. David G. Gil, Violence Against Children: Physical Child Abuse in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
25. Testimony of David Gil, Child Abuse Prevention Act, 1973—Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate. Ninety-Third Congress, First Session, March 26, 27, 31, and April 24, 1973, 17.
26. Ibid.
27. Testimony of Jolly K., Child Abuse Prevention Act, 1973, Hearings, 49.
28. Ibid., 51.
29. Ibid., 55.
30. Ibid., 57.
31. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963), 22.
32. Ibid., 103.
33. Ibid., 104.
34. Ibid., 105.
35. Anne Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” in Notes from the First Year (New York: New York Radical Women, 1968).
36. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2000), 184; Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), 46.
37. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: Bantam, 1972 [1971]), 104.
38. Ibid., 103.
39. Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 210.
40. Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1975), 45; Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents, 236.
41. Sigmund Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (London: Vintage, 1962).
42. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 289.
43. Ibid., 144.
44. Ibid., 141.
45. Ibid., 264.
46. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 134.
47. Ralph Blumenthal, “Freud Archives Research Chief Removed in Dispute Over Yale Talk,” New York Times, November 9, 1981, www.nytimes.com/1981/11/09/nyregion/freud-archives-research-chief-removed-in-dispute-over-yale-talk.html.
48. Masson, The Assault on Truth, xiii.
49. Ibid., 144.
50. Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1974 [1973]), 13.
51. Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed (New York: Free Press, 2011), 17.
52. Ibid., 50.
53. Ibid., 89–90.
54. Schreiber, Sybil, 110.
55. Ibid., 11.
56. Ibid., 123.
57. Ibid., 173.
58. Ibid., 203.
59. Ibid., 183.
60. Ibid., 205.
61. Irving Bieber et al., Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (New York: Basic Books, 1962).
62. Schreiber, Sybil, 209.
63. Ibid., 210.
64. Shirley Ann Mason therapy diary, Flora Rheta Schreiber papers (1916–1988), Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, box 37, folder 1085, May 2, 1958.
65. Nathan, Sybil Exposed, 98.
66. Schreiber, Sybil, 26.
67. Letter to Flora Rheta Schreiber, Flora Rheta Schreiber papers (1916–1988), Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, box 12, folder 303, August 2, 1974.
68. Letter to Flora Rheta Schreiber, Flora Rheta Schreiber papers (1916–1988), Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, box 12, folder 301, December 12, 1973.
69. Nathan, Sybil Exposed, 179.
70. Mike Warnke, with Dave Balsiger and Les Jones, The Satan Seller (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1972).
71. Schreiber, Sybil, 203.
72. Ibid., 209.
73. Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder, Michelle Remembers (New York: Congdon & Lattes, 1980), 3.
74. Ibid., 4.
75. Ibid., 3.
76. Ibid., xvii.
77. Ibid., 7.
78. Ibid., 5.
79. Ibid., 10.
80. Ibid., 17.
81. Ibid., 100.
82. Ibid., 118.
83. Ibid., 237.
84. Ibid., 239.
85. Cardinal S.M.S. (Saint Margaret’s School Yearbook), 1955–1956, 18 (photocopy in author’s possession).
86. Larry Kahaner, Cults That Kill: Probing the Underworld of Occult Crime (New York: Warner Books, 1988), 200.
87. Kristin McMurran, “A Canadian Woman’s Bizarre Childhood Memories of Satan Shock Shrinks and Priests,” People, September 1, 1980.
88. Shirley Ann Mason therapy diary, Flora Rheta Schreiber papers (1916–1988), Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, box 37, folder 1085, May 2, 1958.
89. Damian Inwood, “Author Doesn’t Look the Part of a Re-born Child of Satan,” Vancouver Sun, July or August 1981 [photocopy in author’s possession].
Chapter 2
1. “#16—McMartin Preschool 1-24-84,” VHS tape in the possession of Danny Davis.
2. Kevin Cody, “Virginia McMartin,” Easy Reader, January 25, 1990, 4.
3. “Benjamin Shula [pseud.]—Mother’s Testimony at Grand Jury,” vol. 4, 554, March 19, 1984.
4. Kevin Cody, “Virginia McMartin,” 4.
5. Mary A. Fischer, “McMartin: A Case of Dominoes?” Los Angeles Magazine, October 1989, 126–135, www.byliner.com/read/mary-fischer/a-case-of-dominoes.
6. Debbie Nathan and Michael R. Snedeker, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 71.
7. Jane Hoag, “Supplemental Report re: Victim: Matthew Johnson [pseud.],” 1.
8. Manhattan Beach Police Department, Letter to Parents of Former and Current McMartin Preschool Children, September 8, 1983, available online at http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mcmartin/lettertoparents.html.
9. Bob Zink, “Memorandum,” review of the deposition of Ruth Owen,
October 5, 1987, 3.
10. Gloria Barton (mother of Sara Barton), diary, 3.
11. Ibid., 2.
12. Ross E. Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 28.
13. Police report, Manhattan Beach Police Department, 83-04932, September 16, 1983, 3–4.
14. Nathan and Snedeker, Satan’s Silence, 74.
15. “McMartin Chronology,” Easy Reader, January 25, 1990, 12.
16. David, Shaw, “Reporter’s Early Exclusives Triggered a Media Frenzy,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1990, www.latimes.com/food/la -900120mcmartin_lat-story.html#page=2.
17. “Reporter’s Daily Transcript, Monday, August 8, 1988, Volume 265. The People of the State of California, Plaintiff, vs. Raymond Buckey and Peggy McMartin Buckey, Defendants,” 37, 481.
18. Ibid., 37, 492.
19. Nathan and Snedeker, Satan’s Silence, 76.
20. Kee MacFarlane and Jill Waterman, Sexual Abuse of Young Children: Evaluation and Treatment (New York: Guilford Press, 1986), xiv.
21. Ibid., 72–74.
22. “Reporter’s Daily Transcript, Tuesday, August 9, 1988, Volume 266. The People of the State of California, Plaintiff, vs. Raymond Buckey and Peggy McMartin Buckey, Defendants,” 37, 694.