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.