The Longest Mistrial

By Richard Lacayo

Some horror stories are chilling because they might be true. The horror stories in the McMartin Pre-School trial are chilling for a different reason: despite seven years of investigations and trials, it may never be known whether they are true or false. In a Los Angeles courtroom last week, the jury in the child-molestation trial of Raymond Buckey, 32, a former teacher at the Manhattan Beach, Calif., preschool, declared itself deadlocked. With that, the state decided to drop the charges. Said prosecutor Joseph Martinez: "How long can you keep this up?"

Outside the courtroom, Buckey embraced his father with tears in his eyes and said, "It's all over." It was the second mistrial for Buckey, whose mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, had been acquitted of similar charges in January after the longest trial in U.S. history. That jury had been unable to reach a decision on all the counts against Raymond. Prosecutors then made their second attempt to convict him, this time on charges of molesting three of the children, girls who are now ages 11 to 13. Buckey spent five years in prison awaiting his day in court. The bill to taxpayers for the disastrous case: $13.5 million.

During 15 days of deliberation, the jury had leaned toward acquittal on seven of the eight counts against Buckey. It was split evenly on the last one. "We got more hung ((rather)) than less hung," said jury foreman Richard Dunham. Most of the jurors said they believed some of the children had been molested, but from the evidence presented they could not tell who had done it. "There were too many gaping holes, and too much time had passed," said juror Michael Carapella. Jurors also expressed doubts about videotaped interviews used as evidence in which therapists and social workers encouraged the children to tell stories of Satanism, animal torture and sodomy at the school. "They kept asking questions and leading them until they got what they wanted to hear," said juror Lloyd Isaacson.

/ The case began in 1983 when the mother of one of the children wrote police a letter accusing Buckey of sexually molesting her 2 1/2-year-old son. Not long after, police set off a panic among parents by sending letters to 200 of them stating that authorities were investigating charges of sodomy at the preschool. After videotaped interviews were conducted with 400 children, investigators decided that 369 had been abused. Later, the mother whose claims had initiated the case complained to prosecutors that someone had sodomized her dog and that her estranged husband and an AWOL Marine were also abusing her son. In 1985 she was found to be an acute paranoid schizophrenic.

The case has caused many to take a second look at the methods for investigating allegations of child abuse. It spurred a national debate about appropriate methods for eliciting testimony from children. It has left many of the children and their parents bitter. And it put Ray Buckey in jail for five years without a conviction. "I don't think anybody won in the McMartin case," Buckey says now. But quite a few people lost.

With reporting by Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles