McMartin preschool trial

The McMartin preschool case was an example of day care sex abuse hysteria. Members of the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in California, were charged with sexual abuse of children in their care. After six years of criminal trials, no convictions were obtained, and all charges were dropped in 1990.

Initial allegations

In 1983, Judy Johnson, the mother of one of the Manhattan Beach, California preschool's young students complained to the police that her son had been sodomized by her estranged husband and by McMartin teacher Ray Buckey, who was the grandson of school founder Virginia McMartin and son of administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey. The mother's belief was based on the fact that her son suffered from painful bowel movements, though he denied her suggestion that his preschool teachers had molested him. In addition, she also made several more extravagant accusations, including that people at the daycare had travelled to zoos seeking sexual encounters with giraffes. Ray Buckey was questioned, but was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence. The police, however, sent an open letter to about 200 parents of students at the McMartin school, stating that their children may have been forced into sex, and asking the parents to question their children.

Interviewing the children

Several hundred children were then questioned by the Children’s Institute International (CII), a Los Angeles abuse therapy clinic. By spring of 1984, 360 children had been identified as having been abused. No physical evidence was found to support the allegations. The mother who made the original complaint was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the same year. Critics have alleged that the questioners asked the children leading questions, repetitively, which, it is said, always yields positive responses from young children, making it impossible to know what the child actually experienced. Some claim the questioning alone may have led to false-memory syndrome among the children who were questioned.

Bizarre allegations

Some of the children's accusations were bizarre. Some alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken in one case through secret underground tunnels, which were sought by investigators but never found. Ray Buckey was described as having beaten a giraffe to death with a baseball bat in front of the children. When shown a series of photographs by police, one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.^* There were claims of orgies at car washes and airports, and of children being flushed down toilets to secret rooms where they would be abused, then cleaned up and presented back to their unsuspecting parents. Some children said they were made to play a game called "Naked Movie Star" in which they were photographed nude. Despite a multi-million dollar world wide search in conjunction with Interpol, no child pornography was ever found during the investigation.

Media coverage

Like other high-profile criminal trials in the United States, such as the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the McMartin trial was heavily covered by television and print media. In 1986, a telephone survey showed that 96 percent of adults in the area had heard of the case, and over 90 percent of those who had an opinion believed the accused were guilty.

Spread of panic

A moral panic followed, touching off a witch hunt in which network news shows claimed that sexual abuse of children in schools and day-care centers was nationwide and rampant.

Aftermath

The McMartin preschool itself was closed and leveled. Three of the accused have died since the trial concluded. In many states, laws were passed allowing children to testify on closed-circuit TV so the children would not be traumatized by facing the accused. In 1988 case of Coy v. Iowa these laws were held to violate the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right of the accused to confront witnesses against them. However, this doctrine is limited; in the 1990 case Maryland v. Craig, the United States Supreme Court ruled that closed circuit testimony was permissible where it was limited to circumstances in which the judge found likelihood of harm to the minor from testifying in open court. One lasting legacy of the trial is an increased understanding of how to question very young children for evidence, with an eye toward their capacity for suggestibility and false memory.

Allegations of secret tunnels

An excavation undertaken in May 1990 claimed to reveal tunnels under the McMartin Preschool. A relevant quote from the summation is written as follows: "If the stories of the children were bogus fantasies, there is no excuse for the tunnels discovered under the school. If there really were tunnels, there is no excuse for the glib dismissal of any and all of the complaints of the children and their parents." The archaeologist's claims were refuted in a 1995 article published by the Institute for Psychological Therapies. The study showed that the concrete slab floor was undisturbed except for a small patch where the sewer line was tapped into. Once the slab was removed, there was no sign of any materials to line or hold up any tunnels, and there was no way for the defendants to fill in any purported tunnels once the investigation began. The report concluded that any disturbed soil under the slab was from the sewer line, and from construction fill buried under the slab, before it was poured. Some dated fill material under the slab was from the year 1940. [http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume7/j7_2_1_31.htm

External links

Movie

Indictment: The McMartin Trial

History of Los Angeles | Mass hysteria | Day care sexual abuse hysteria

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