Six Years of Trial by Torture

By MARGARET CARLSON

About the worst thing that can happen to a child is to be sexually molested. About the worst thing that can happen to an adult is to be wrongly accused of committing such a heinous crime. The tragedy of last week's not-guilty verdict in the McMartin case, the longest, most expensive trial in U.S. history, is that both horrors may have occurred. Said Judge William Pounders: "The case has poisoned everyone who had contact with it."

Although seven of the twelve jurors said they believed the nine child witnesses were molested "in some sense by someone," the prosecution was unable to show that the children were abused at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Nonetheless, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 63, and her son Raymond, 31, spent two years and five years, respectively, in jail before their acquittal on 52 criminal counts. They have lost everything, including their good standing in the community.

The ordeal began on Aug. 12, 1983, when Judy Johnson complained to Manhattan Beach police that her son had been molested by a man named Mister Ray. The boy, 2 1/2, had attended McMartin Pre-School 14 times over three months and had been in Buckey's class no more than two afternoons. Johnson's complaints against Buckey grew increasingly bizarre. She accused him of sodomizing her son while he stuck the boy's head in a toilet, making him ride naked on a horse and tormenting him with an air tube. She made similar accusations against her estranged husband, an AWOL Marine, and three health-club employees. Nevertheless, prosecutors presented Johnson as their first witness at a preliminary hearing in July 1984.

In 1985 Johnson was found to be an acute paranoid schizophrenic; she died of alcohol-related liver disease in 1986. But by then the prosecution no longer needed her. The police had written to 200 parents stating that the authorities were investigating oral sex and sodomy at the McMartin school. To the parents of affluent Manhattan Beach who thought the McMartin school was the first step on the road to Stanford, this was a bombshell. They soon had fantastic stories to tell after their children were interviewed by Kee MacFarlane, an administrator turned therapist at Children's Institute International (CII).

The interviews would prove to be the undoing of the prosecutor's case. By early 1984, investigators concluded that 369 of the 400 children interviewed had been abused. MacFarlane's technique seemed Pavlovian: emotional rewards to the children who accused the teachers, rebuffs to those who did not. "What good are you? You must be dumb," she said to one child who knew nothing about the game Naked Movie Star. MacFarlane recorded stories of children digging up dead bodies at cemeteries, jumping out of airplanes, killing animals with bats. When asked to point out molesters while driving around the city, children fingered community leaders, store clerks and gas-station attendants; one child picked out photos of actor Chuck Norris and Los Angeles City Attorney James Hahn.

Los Angeles District Attorney Robert Philibosian, whose election campaign was not going well, made the case his own. He presented 18 children to the grand jury, which returned indictments against Raymond, his mother, sister, grandmother and three McMartin teachers. On March 24, 1984, police accompanied by television cameras arrested them at home. Raymond's sister Peggy Ann Buckey was arrested in front of her high school class. Only crippled matriarch ( Virginia McMartin, 82, honored for her community service, was allowed to surrender voluntarily.

In January 1986 charges against five of those originally accused and jailed were abruptly dropped when a new district attorney, Ira Reiner, declared a "complete absence of evidence" against them. That did not stop a determined prosecutor, Lael Rubin, from relentlessly pursuing the case against Peggy Buckey and Raymond. There was little corroborating evidence. Child pornography, which prosecutors had suggested was the Buckeys' motive, was not proved: despite an international search for evidence by five government agencies, including the FBI, no pornographic photos of the McMartin children were ever found.

Although the Buckeys were acquitted, the case is still not closed. District Attorney Reiner must decide whether to pursue the 13 counts against Raymond Buckey on which the jury could not reach a verdict. Peggy McMartin Buckey has filed a $1 million suit against the city, county, CII, and others. In Manhattan Beach, parents of the children are outraged. "The anger is beginning to rise," says parent Mary Mae Cioffi. "Our justice system needs a revamp for kids."

Nationally, the attention generated by the McMartin case set off an explosion in the reported instances of child sexual abuse, to an estimated 350,000 in 1988, vs. 6,000 in 1976. Judicial reforms have been adopted to protect young victims from being brutalized a second time in court. Specially trained professionals question children more carefully now. More than half the states protect children from having to testify in open court, allowing either videotaped or closed-circuit testimony. That protection will be tested by the Supreme Court. Last week the Justices agreed to consider two cases in which defendants argue that they were denied their Sixth Amendment right to confront their accusers. So far, the reforms are working. Although only an estimated 10% to 15% of sex-abuse complaints are prosecuted, about 90% of those end in conviction.

The realization, from the McMartin case and others like it, that trustworthy authority figures can sometimes be child molesters may have created a monster that ensnares innocent people. One day social workers talk about how to get children and parents to report incidents of sexual abuse; the next day Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue have a line of people waiting to tell their stories. Some parents, determined to damage each other in a divorce, are throwing abuse charges around. Those bent on destroying a reputation have a surefire weapon.

If the McMartin children were not robbed of their innocence by sexual abuse, it was stolen from them by a legal system that took more than six years to bring this case to a conclusion. One child witness was four when the abuse allegedly occurred, seven when she first told a social worker about it, eight when she told her story to a grand jury, ten when she told it to a judge, and eleven when she finally told it to the jury that rendered its verdict last Thursday. Perhaps the only thing of value that has come out of this case is the determination to ensure that such a fiasco can never occur again.

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty and Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles