CHILD MOLESTATION CASES
- Has a child been
molested?
- Why Children
Lie in Court
- The McMartin
Preschool Witch' Hunt
- Victims of Child
Abuse Laws
- Learning from the
McMartin Hoax
Has a child been molested?
A psychiatrist argues for reforms in the
way child sexual abuse cases are investigated.
by Lee Coleman, M.D. Berkeley
psychiatrist, Lee Coleman. M.D., wrote about the use of
psychiatry in the courtroom in his 1984 book ‘The Reign of
Error’.
“Innocent until proven guilty." It's a
sacred principle of our legal system, and one we have for the
most part lived up to. Until recently, that is. In the past few
years we have abandoned this principle in cases of alleged child
sexual abuse. Particularly noteworthy in such cases is the cozy
relationship between law enforcement and psychiatry. Police and
prosecutors have traditionally thumbed their noses at
psychiatry, but now these former enemies are dedicated allies in
the war on child sexual abuse. The tools of psychiatry may not
be worth much when it comes to men’s realms, but they are
reliable (so the argument seems to go) when it comes to
determining if a child has been molested and finding out who did
it.
Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of our
handling of such cases--and the single most important reason the
system is doing a terrible job at getting at the truth—is the
direct importation into investigations and court proceedings of
the idea that "children don't lie about sexual abuse."
Where did investigators get such an idea?
From the "experts” in hundreds of workshops for police,
protective service workers and prosecutors, the leading lights
from psychiatry, psychology and social work are training
investigators to believe that when it comes to alleged sexual
abuse, the child's statements are unimpeachable.
Ignored at such workshops is the fact that
the experts developed their ideas by studying incest in intact
families, while the major arena of false allegations is
divorce/custody battles. In the former the child may be
pressured to drop a true accusation, but in the latter the
pressure may go the other way to "remember" something that never
happened. The young child may easily be led to the point of
sincerely believing in things that did not take place.
Armed, nonetheless, with the belief that
under no circumstances would a child claim to have been molested
unless it were true, child protection agencies are ready to send
a child for "therapy" before any kind of thorough investigation
has been done. Even worse, those interviewing a child allegedly
molested (whether investigators or therapists) frequently
manipulate the child. They do so because they do not take very
seriously the possibility of a false allegation. Let us look at
why this is happening.
If "children don't lie" about sexual
abuse, then it follows that a child may be asked leading and
suggestive questions about possible molestation, urged to
pretend with dolls, and rewarded for statements indicating
abuse, with no danger that a child may stray from the truth. Any
denials of abuse merely indicate that the "yukky secrets" are
hard to tell and that the abuser must have threatened the child
into silence.
As a result of such thinking, the
"sensitive and caring" professional pushes even harder until the
child complies and offers up information about sexual
exploitation. My own study of audio and videotaped interviews
with children indicates that this is how the claptrap about
"satanic cults" and murders has surfaced in places like Jordan,
Minnesota, Bakersfield, and the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan
Beach.
Three possibilities
If it is not true that children never
"lie" about sexual abuse, it is true that such a thing is rather
unlikely. But this misses the point. When it comes to a child's
statements about sexual victimization, there are not two
possibilities—lying or telling the truth—but three. A child may
be neither lying nor telling the truth. A child, particularly a
very young one, may say what he or she believes is true, even
though it is not the truth.
At first blush, this seems a rather
unlikely possibility, to say the least. A child believes in
sexual abuse, which has not taken place? I would certainly be
skeptical of such an idea if I hadn't had a chance to see how
children are being manipulated by adult interviewers, sometimes
by a police officer or protective service worker, sometimes by a
mental health professional—who have been trained to believe that
those who really care and are sufficiently skilled at their work
will help the child talk about sexual abuse.
Consider what such methodology does to a
case in which the child has been manipulated before the police
or child protection worker arrives. Especially when divorce and
child custody disputes are taking place, it is a tragic fact
that certain parents either deliberately create false
accusations, or interpret a child's problems as "subtle clues"
to child sexual abuse. Everything from nightmares to temper
tantrums is being listed by the experts as signs that should
alert parents to the possibility of sexual abuse.
Thus, when an investigator first contacts
a child, it is crucial that all possibilities be considered.
Instead, too often a judgment is reached once the child's
statements are heard, however inconsistent they may be. The
investigation effectively grinds to a halt, because "children
don't lie about sexual abuse." All that is left is for the judge
to give the juvenile court's stamp of approval. The possibility
that the child may have been manipulated by an adult with an axe
to grind is not taken seriously.
By the time the child has been interviewed
several times. the statements may become increasingly
embellished, and any chance to help the child stick to what he
remembers is lost forever. The child now believes he has been
molested, because so many adults believe the same thing and seem
so pleased with the child for saying so.
The use of dolls and other play materials
is a powerful technique for confounding this problem. Consider
the difficulties inherent in using play materials to get at the
truth. Children use dolls, puppets or drawings to make
stories—not to stick to the facts. Why are such techniques
nonetheless being used in fact-finding investigations? Because
our legal system has naively turned to the child therapists, who
have used play therapy for decades. But using play techniques in
therapy is one thing; using such techniques in legal
investigations is quite another. Even worse is the result when
the adult interviewer is already convinced that sexual abuse has
taken place and (perhaps unwittingly) uses play methods to coax
some "evidence" from the child.
Four reforms
Awareness of these problems leads directly
to the kinds of legal reforms needed to bring some sense of
proportion to protecting children from sexual exploitation.
First, all contacts with the child must be
either video or audio-taped. Taping preserves a record not only
of what the child says, but of the interviewer's behavior. Such
a record will not only spare the child repeated interviews; it
will also give county counsel, district attorneys, defense
attorneys, judges, and juries an opportunity to study whether a
child's statements seem spontaneous or the product of
manipulation.
Second, a child's competence to testify
must be examined in a more thorough way than it is at present.
With few exceptions, children as young as four are being found
competent if they can tell the difference between the truth and
a lie. But such awareness is irrelevant if a child has been so
manipulated by adults that he believes something happened which
did not happen. Judges faced with deciding whether a child is
competent to testify must focus on the issue of independent
recall. Is the child capable of sticking to what he can
remember, or has prior training contaminated his ability to do
so?
Third, our juvenile court procedures are
in urgent need of major review. The vast majority of child
sexual abuse allegations are not prosecuted criminally but are
handled in juvenile court, where tradition dictates that judges
rely heavily on casework evaluations. It is especially here that
an accused person may be considered guilty until proven
innocent. Judges, acting in good faith, assume that the child
protection system is doing a good job of unbiased investigation.
This faith is misplaced, given the biases that currently pervade
our county child protection agencies.
Fourth, our child protection system will
need to alter its current practices. Its primary mistake has
been placing so much trust in the experts. By now the mistaken
ideas from mental health are rooted in the very foundations of
our investigative agencies. While I don't see this reform coming
soon or easily, nothing less than a massive retraining will be
necessary. Just as in other kinds of investigations, the primary
role of unbiased fact-finding must be established, with no
reliance on "examinations" from mental health professionals.
Whatever psychiatry and related disciplines are good for, they
do no good, and much harm, when it comes to getting at the
truth.
If psychiatry has no examinations to
determine if a child has been molested, and has no examinations
to determine if the accused person is a child molester, then our
continued reliance on psychiatry will only add a new form of
child abuse, one in which we subject the very children we aim to
protect to manipulations they are powerless to resist.
California Lawyer
Why Children Lie in Court
New research shows how the power of
suggestion can lead youngsters to say things that send innocent
adults to jail.
By JEROME CRAMER WASHINGTON
The poignant scene is played-out time and
again in America's courtrooms. A small, bewildered child sits in
a witness chair, being led by an attorney through shocking
testimony. The youngster speaks haltingly of unspeakable things
done to him or her by a stranger, a baby-sitter or even a
parent. Could such an innocent soul possibly be telling anything
but the truth?
Most legal experts, child
psychiatrists—and juries--have long thought that children rarely
lie about sex-abuse crimes on the witness stand. On the strength
of that assumption, many adults have been sent to jail for
sexual abuse or other charges, professing all the way that they
are not guilty. But evidence is mounting that children,
particularly those who have been extensively coached, give
inaccurate testimony far more often than previously imagined.
Both research studies and courtroom experience are causing many
psychiatrists to question their views of the reliability of what
comes from the mouths of babes.
A stunning piece of evidence came late
last year when a California appeals court overturned the
convictions of three men and four women for molesting 10
children. The adults had maintained their innocence but were
sentenced to a combined total of 2,619 years in prison. The case
fell apart, and the adults were freed when three of the children
later recanted their testimony and the state attorney general's
office criticized the way prosecutors had allegedly manipulated
the children's testimony.
Recent research has shown how easy it is
for youngsters to stray unwittingly from the truth.
Psychologists Karen Saywitz of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and
Gail Goodman of the State University of New York at Buffalo
interviewed 72 girls, ages 5 and 7, about routine medical
procedures they had received. Half were given full examinations,
including anal and vaginal checks, and the rest were given just
general physicals. When the first group was asked a broad
question about what I had happened, only eight mentioned the
vaginal examinations, and when the children were shown
anatomically correct dolls, six pointed to the vaginal area. But
of the girls who received only a general checkup, three claimed
they had also had vaginal or anal exams. One child even reported
that "the doctor did it with a stick."
Child-custody disputes are often the
trigger for youngsters' unwitting lies. Suspicions can cause
parents to launch what legal scholar Douglas Besharov of
Washington's American Enterprise Institute calls "the atomic
bomb of child-custody fights, the charge of sex abuse." In these
stressful situations, children quickly discover what adults want
to hear and can offer lies or distortions in order to please an
anxious parent or social worker. A study conducted by the
American Academy of Child Psychiatry found that in custody
disputes involving charges of sex abuse, as many as 36% of the
allegations were later proved to be untrue.
Research by psychologist Alison
Clarke-Stewart of the University of California at Irvine
illustrates how easily adults can sway children's perceptions.
In that study 75 five and six-year-old children were asked to
watch a man clean up a room. During that time, he picked up and
cleaned a doll. Later an interviewer told the children she
thought the man had been playing with the doll. When first
questioned, 25% of the kids said the man had played with the
doll, and the rest said he had cleaned it. The interviewer then
told the children she was certain that the man had been playing
with, not cleaning, the doll. In the end, all but two children
accepted the interviewer's story as the truth.
Misleading questions by adults can cause
children not just to lie but also to believe their falsehoods.
Besharov cites the case of a three-year-old who told a social
worker a story about a piece of candy being dropped into her
underpants. After interviews by various child-protection
workers, the story evolved into a tale that a candle had been
inserted into the child's vagina. It took months of further
interviews to discover that the original story had been correct.
The current methods for obtaining evidence
in sex-abuse cases—direct questioning and the use of dolls with
sex organs; are under fire. "Kids can be fed ideas they quickly
come to believe are true, and these dolls are highly
suggestive," says Lenore Terr, a professor of psychology at the
University of California at San Francisco. For example, some of
the dolls lack hands and have only painted eyes, yet they have
highly explicit genital areas. Terr stresses that normally
inquisitive children who play with these dolls can mistakenly be
suspected of having been abused.
The controversy is sure to escalate this
spring, when the American Psychological Association publishes a
book called The Suggestibility of Children's Recollections, in
which several experts question the truthfulness of kids'
testimony. The APA will not allow outsiders an advance look, but
a psychologist involved in the project says the book shows that
"there are definite limits to our knowledge about whether
children are telling the truth."
What these researchers and others are
finding is that truth for a child can be blurred, especially in
periods of stress, such as during a trial. To protect children
from sex crimes— and adults from unfounded
accusations—child-welfare workers and prosecutors will have to
take special care when searching for the truth.
The McMartin Preschool Witch' Hunt
It was the longest preliminary hearing in
the history of California. It became the longest and most
expensive trial in the history of the United States. It caused
one journalist to write: “It is the most interesting case I have
ever heard of, and the most frightening. It is bizarre and
unreal— so much so, in fact, that jaded, middle-aged, veteran
newsmen from major, national news media nave left the courtroom
rubbing their foreheads in disbelief after a day spent covering
the proceedings. Several of the news-people who have attended
the hearing for all these months nave complained of chronic
nightmares and sleep disturbances. So have the lawyers. So have
I.
"The media coverage has been superficial,
infrequent and not very informative. They apparently do not
understand that it may be the best story they will ever get. It
is a landmark that will affect every child abuse case in the
country. It will affect much more that that. McMartin may well
be talked about three hundred years from now."
An article recently appearing in the
magazine Los Angeles chronicled the events surrounding this
celebrated case. An edited version is reprinted below.
A Case of Dominoes
It was the moment everyone had been
waiting for. Last July, principal defendant Raymond Buckey was
finally tiling the witness stand in the McMartin Preschool
child-molestation trial. Camera crews and cable lines jammed the
hallway.
Prosecutor, Lael Rubin grilled Buckey
about games that were played, in the nude, the stabbing of
horses, and the raping of little girls. Yet Buckey remained
calm, speaking in an assured monotone, he denied every charge
against him.
Rubin hammered away, asking about the
former McMartin Preschool teacher's habit of keeping adult
erotica in his bedroom. Specifically, Rubin asked if he had ever
affixed photos of preschoolers onto the sexually explicit
pictures of adults.
"I know I never did that," Buckey said
emphatically.
"How do you know this?" Rubin asked.
“Because I know what I do and what I
don't do," he shot back.
"And what is it you don't do, Mr Buckey?"
she baited.
Defense lawyers voice loud objections,
cutting off the exchange, But Buckey wouldn't be stopped. He'd
waited' nearly six years to make this statement. Indignantly, he
leaned forward in his chair, glaring at Rubin.
"Look. Ms. Rubin." Buckey said. “I’ve
spent five years in jail for something I didn't do. I know what
I do and I know what I don't do. And I don't molest children."
When the McMartin case is mentioned these
days, most people are understandably confused. It first burst on
the scene in February 1984, and within a few short months eight
South Bay preschools had been closed and seven defendants
charged with allegations of everything from sodomy and oral
copulation to satanic rites and animal sacrifice. Yet today, as
the longest Trial in United States history comes to a close at a
cost of $16 million - all that is left are two defendants facing
64 counts of child molestation and one count of conspiracy. And
unless a mistrial is called over juror disqualification, Peggy
McMartin Buckey, 61, will most likely be acquitted, and her son,
Ray Buckey, 30 -at the very worst —appears headed toward a hung
jury.
What went wrong? What became of the crime
of the century that six years ago shocked the world?
The answers lie partly in secrets long
withheld from the public but known well by those close to the
case. Previously sealed court documents recently made available
tell part of the story. But mostly, as the facts come to light,
the answer appears to be that there was never any case at all
Indeed, in the end it may alt come down to
the actions of six individuals, who, for reasons of ambition,
vested interest or simply bad judgment, created their own domino
effect when no credible evidence ever existed against the
defends.
At the very least, it is a blueprint for
preying on public fears and, as Los Angeles District Attorney
Ira Reiner charges, blowing a criminal case out of all
proportion. It may also be the story of how a case was simply
invented
The Mother
She was 12 when her mother died of Cancer,
but Judy Johnson never fully recovered from the blow: Cheery on
the outside, she hid her problems from friends until it was to
late.
In March 1983, after the birth of their
second son, and due to fierce squabbles over money, Judy
Johnson's husband Bernard walked out. Broke and alone, Johnson
got a job selling lamps, and she needed to find a nursery school
to look after her young son. Of all the preschools in the area,
Johnson knew the McMartin Preschool, founded by Virginia
McMartin and later directed by her daughter Peggy McMartin
Buckey, to be the most desirable. In business since 1958, the
school had a proven track record, with a long history of
satisfied parents.
When Johnson called McMartin to inquire
about enrolling her son, she was told there was a long waiting
list. So on the morning of May 12, 1983, she simply dropped the
two-and-a-half-year-old off at the front gale and drove off.
None of the teachers knew who he was - he was still preverbal,
unable even to give his name, and there were no tags on his
clothes or on his lunch bag. But, reasoning that a parent would
eventually come for him, they took the child in for the day.
After speaking with Johnson later, McMartin Buckey said she
"felt sorry" for the woman and enrolled the boy that June. That
decision would prove to be the worst one of her life.
On July 11, Johnson visited a health care
clinic. According to medical reports, she told a physician that
her son's anus was "itchy." Believing the problem was with the
mother, the doctor didn't feel it was necessary to examine the
boy.
On August 11, Johnson's son returned to
McMartin's. By that day, he had been to the preschool a total pf
14 times. The teacher supervising the afternoon play session
that day was Ray Buckey, the grandson of Virginia McMartin.
Johnson's son had never been in Ray's class.
The following morning, Johnson called the
Manhattan Beach police and was connected with juvenile officer
Jane Hoag. She told Hoag that her son's bottom was red and that
he had blurted out something about a man named Ray at his
nursery school. It was this call to Hoag that sparked the
biggest mass-molestation case in history, but for Johnson, it
was another in a series of steps toward madness and an early
death from an alcohol-related liver disease.
It wasn't long before Johnson's
accusations took on a life of their own. Within six weeks of her
call to Hoag, according to previously sealed police reports,
Johnson was accusing Buckey of wearing a mask and sodomizing her
son while he stuck the boy's head in a toilet. A few months
later, she claimed he had taped her son's mouth, eyes and hands,
and stuck an air tube in the boy's rectum. On subsequent days,
she said Buckey made her son ride naked on a horse and then
molested him while dressing as a cop, a fireman, a clown, and
Santa Claus.
By February 1984, Johnson's allegations
turned increasing bizarre, in phone calls and letters to the
district attorney's office, she said that her son had been
sodomized by an AWOL marine and by three models from a health
club. In one letter she said that the family dog may have also
been sodomized, as it "had some hair missing." She wrote that
McMartin teachers jabbed "scissors into his eyes and staples in
his ears, nipples, and tongue”; Ray pricked her son's right
finger and put it in a goat's anus: and Peggy (Ray's mother)
killed a baby and made him drink the blood."
Then in 1985, shortly after her divorce
was final, Johnson retreated into paranoia. According to her
brother, she met him at her front door one day with a l2-gauge
shotgun. Police dragged her to a patrol car, and she underwent a
12-day psychiatric evaluation. Diagnosis: acute paranoid
schizophrenia. Her ex-husband was eventually given custody of
the boy,
Four months before the trial started in
1987, Johnson died. She was 44. Police found her lying naked and
face down in her son's bedroom, her phone off the hook and the
Yellow Pages opened to "Liquor Stores." But by then the McMartin
case had no further need for the woman who had started it all.
The dominoes had already begun to fall against the defendants.
The Cop
Jane Hoag went to work as a detective in
the Manhattan Beach Police Department when she was 22, She was
assigned to the sex abuse and juvenile beats and had the
reputation in the community of being brusque and zealous in the
pursuit of her cases, Hoag once told a reporter that it was not
unusual for her to work 15 hours a day, though she was married
with two young children.
Based entirely on a telephone call from
Johnson she became obsessed with the alleged guilt of one man.
Nothing could sway her - not an extraordinary lack of evidence,
not the few other suspects she subsequently interviewed. Nor
could she consider another possibility: that there had been no
crime. On August 12. 1983, Hoag had listened to Johnson's
complaint about a McMartin teacher named Ray. She told Johnson
to have her son examined at a health clinic. A doctor there
noted redness around the boy's anus, but was unable to determine
the cause.
Apparently unsatisfied with the results,
Hoag sent Johnson to UCLA Medical Center five days later. Two
doctors, one an intern, determined that the boy's condition was
"consistent" with being sodomized. Later, the intern confided
"she didn't know anything about sexual abuse," a former LAPD
detective said. The other physician confirmed her evaluation in
testimony, but her ability to recall details was challenged when
she maintained the boy had been circumcised, though, according
to his father, he had not.
Hoag visited Johnson's home three times in
August to interview the boy. When she could’nt get him to talk,
she concluded "he didn't understand the concept of the word
"name." (In fact, according to court reports, the boy never
spoke at all to Hoag.) Then, hoping to get the boy to identify
Buckey visually, she showed him class photos that included
Buckey, but the boy was unable to identify him.
During searches of the Buckey homes,
officers seized attendance records, a Polaroid camera, rope,
yarn, and class photos. They were looking for a video camera and
child pornography photos, but came away empty-handed. They also
seized a rubber duck from Peggy McMartin Buckey's beachside
home, Virginia McMartin's diaries, and even Peggy Ann Buckey's
USC graduation gown, which prosecutor Rubin would later claim
was a satanic robe.
One of the parents told Mrs. Buckey that
Officer Hoag had called her repeatedly and said,— Your child has
been named as a victim. And if you really love your child you'll
ask him these questions . . . Others gave similar accounts of
the telephone calls.
In 1984 Haag won the "Officer of the Year"
award for her work on the McMartin investigation.
The Social Worker
Attractive and vivacious, Kee MacFarlane
had been a program administrator with the National Center on
Child Abuse and Neglect for several years. In LA, she joined the
staff of Children's Institute International (CIl), an agency
that cared for abused and neglected children.
MacFarlane interviewed the first McMartin
preschooler on November 1. She used undressed, anatomically
detailed dolls in a playtime setting to elicit responses. By
mid-1984. nearly 400 children had been interviewed: or those,
MacFarlane and other CII social workers filed reports indicating
their suspicions that 369 had been molested. Of those, many
attended the preschool long before Buckey even began working
there, some, in fact, while he was still in high school.
What's not commonly known is that with the
exception of one child, all of the former preschoolers denied
being molested at the school until after they were interviewed
at CII. "The case was made at Cll, not at the preschool," said
Buckey’s attorney. That child who made a claim was dropped from
the case because her allegations were considered too bizarre.
Expected to be the foundation of the
prosecution's case, MacFarlane's interviews would actually wind
up being a boon for the defense because of the nature of her
questions. The following exchanges were taken from official
transcripts of the video-taped interviews. In the interview, the
boy — a witness in the McMartin trial —is holding an alligator
puppet, and the two are discussing a game —Naked Movie Star
—that investigators alleged Ray Buckey played with the children.
Boy: "Well, I didn't really hear it [Naked
Movie Star) a whole lot. I just heard someone yell it from out
in the…"
PAUSE: "Maybe, Mr. Alligator, you peeked
in the window one day and saw them playing it, and maybe you
could remember and help us."
Boy: "Well, no, I haven't seen anyone
playing Naked Movie Star, I've only heard the song."
MacFARLANE: "What good are you? You must
be dumb."
Some of the litany of accusations coming
out of CII seemed absurd, at least on the surface: children
digging up dead bodies at a cemetery with pickaxes larger than
they were: children jumping out of airplanes over Palos Verdes:
horses beaten to death with bats and machetes: children molested
in car washes and grocery stores. During this time, according to
a defense investigator, MacFarlane urged parents to drive around
town with their children to pinpoint possible perpetrators. The
result was pandemonium. Soon children were pointing out
community leaders, gas-station attendants, and store clerks.
Hoag kept busy interviewing some of these candidates, but not
one person, other than the McMartin teachers remained suspects.
A former 20-year juvenile-division
investigator, said of the CII process: "It was certainly
different from how we would have handled It. It sure seemed
stupid. When we interview kids suspected of being abused, we try
to get the truth from them and not put words in their mouths."
In the end, seven McMartin teachers were
indicted on more than 200 counts of child molestation. The
defendants included Ray Buckey, his mother, grandmother, and
sister, plus former McMartin teachers Beny Raidor, Babette
Spitler, and Mary Ann Jackson.
The Politician
Robert Philibosian was appointed District
Attorney for Los Angeles county when the former DA became
Attorney General in January 1983.
In September of that year, Philibosian
shifted into gear as a politician. He faced an election in 1984
and needed a strategy. The one he adopted became one of the most
critical developments in further cementing the McMartin case.
In early September, Philibosian
commissioned a public-opinion poll. When asked which issue
concerned the citizens the most, child abuse rated number one.
George Young, Philibosian's campaign manager, called the poll "a
shopping expedition" for something the district attorney could
take advantage of."
Within six weeks of the poll,
Philibosian's office was in control of the McMartin case.
Despite an ongoing investigation by Manhattan Beach police,
however, no credible evidence had been discovered. In spite of
that fact, Philibosian was able to obtain a grand jury
indictment of all seven of the defendants.
Despite Philibosian's efforts to address
the public's alarm over child abuse, he lost the election in
December 1984. Within eight months of taking office, the new DA
dismissed the charges against five of the McMartin defendants,
saying the evidence was "incredibly weak."
Philibosian responded: "Why was Reiner
[the new DA] to come along with no felony prosecution experience
and prune this case? This was not a rose bush to prune away the
bad experiences of children. All of the defendants should have
stood trial."
The Reporter
Investigative reporter Wayne Satz was
described by his former college roommate as "a kind of guy who
wanted to get ahead." Satz's bold, sensational stories prompted
one KABC news employee to confide that "he seemed more
interested in making news than reporting it." Some media sources
joked that Satz was on his way to the Geraldo Revera School of
Journalism.
In an FBI document, Kee MacFarlane Stated
she told KABC reporter Satz, that he would have an exclusive on
the McMartin story in February, a period that coincided with the
important ratings-sweep week. On February 2. 1984. Satz brought
the McMartin story to the world. His report told of dozens of
"alleged" acts of oral copulation and sodomy with "little"
children.
Although Satz covered himself by using the
qualifiers "alleged" and "reportedly," his newscasts, one
reporter said, "set the tone that these people were monsters."
In June 1984 Los Angeles Times television critic Rosenberg
noted: "It was like calling Hiroshima an alleged bombing." And
the Satz style helped to stir up hysteria and establish in the
public's mind that the defendants were guilty. In one segment,
while he reported on the alleged mutilation of rabbits, live
bunnies were used as an on-camera backdrop to illustrate the
charge.
Most of the coverage for the next two
years carried the same frenzied slant. Reporters were swept away
by the horrifying charges, reinforcing what most of the public
already believed about the defendants. Chris Woodyard, who
covered the case early on for the Herald Examiner said: "There
was very much a mob psychology operating in those days." An
April 1984 People story carried the incriminating headline: "The
McMartins: The 'Model Family' Down the Block that Ran
California's Nightmare Nursery." It wasn't until three years
after the case broke that the press calmed down and reporters
"began to think for themselves." Woodyard said.
Satz ultimately won two Golden Mike awards
for his reporting on the McMArtin case, though he was later
criticized for entering into a romantic relationship with
MacFarlane, his primary source.
The Prosecutor
Lael Rubin had the reputation in the DA's
office of being a "tough and tenacious" prosecutor. Once she
became lead prosecutor on the McMartin case in March 1984,
Rubin, along with two co-prosecutors, became acquainted with
Johnson and her increasingly bizarre allegations. Stevens, one
of the co-prosecutors, said he received increasingly strange
telephone calls from Johnson. And then there was her
hand-scrawled letter to the DA accusing various men of
sodomizing her son and the McMartin teachers of jabbing scissors
into his eyes and staples in his ears, nipples, and tongue.
Eventually, child pornography surfaced as
the official motive, igniting a massive, national and
international hunt by Interpol and FBI agents to track down
pictures of the McMartin children. None were ever found. A
Huntington Beach archaeological research team was hired to make
a painstaking search for alleged underground secret rooms and
tunnels where the children claimed they'd been molested. The
researchers tore up the preschool floor and used an electronic
scanning device to try to locate the secret passages.
Investigators dug up the vacant lot next door to the school and
analyzed the found pieces of chicken bones to determine if they
had been tortured.
The results? "You can boil everything down
to zero," Stevens says. Still Rubin remained steadfast in her
determination to prosecute the Buckeys. Just because they didn't
find any (child pornography) doesn't mean it doesn't exist,"
Rubin told a reporter.
"It was as if this case was Lael's star
vehicle," Stevens says, "And she wasn't going to let the facts
get in her way,"
By the time Stevens openly expressed his
doubts about the guilt of the defendants, hysteria had risen to
a witch-hunt pitch in the South Bay. Seven other preschools
closed down under the weight of suspicion. At least one parent
openly vowed to kill the defendants if they were released from
jail. Residents turned into vigilantes. One spraypainted "Ray
will die" on a wall of the preschool. Later, the preschool was
set on fire.
"Wherever the words child abuse came up,
all of a sudden there was a presumption of guilt," notes public
defender Hall. "And rather than the investigations taking into
account evidence that pointed to the innocence of a suspect, the
investigations were bent on building cases."
Even after Reiner, Rubin's boss, dismissed
all charges against five of the women, Rubin insisted that
hundreds of children had been molested at the preschool. "I
believe in this case; I believe all of the crimes occurred. And
that's what I intend to argue to a jury," she told Mike Wallace
on Sixty Minutes.
As we go to press, the trial has lost all
six jurors and is feared headed toward a mistrial if one more
juror drops out The prosecution and defense have rested their
cases and are moving into final arguments, which are expected to
last a month. Judge William Pounders says he hopes to get the
case to the jury for deliberation by December 1. by Mary A.
Fischer, August 1989
Women of the 90s A special feature in the
Gazette Telegraph (Colorado)
Sunday, October 22, 1989
Child abuse. Those two words carry heavy
images: Physically and emotionally scarred children, ruined
marriages, ruined lives.
There's another image, too - that of the
accused adult. Many of the accused are guilty, some are not.
It's for the latter group that organizers have formed a national
nonprofit group called VOCAL: Victims Of Child Abuse Laws, a
resource for those who believe they are falsely accused of
assaulting children.
A personal experience prompted Susan
Gabriel, a technical writer at TRW, to organize a VOCAL chapter
here. Shortly after she married her second husband a few years
ago, he was accused of sexually molesting one of her two
daughters.
"It just wiped me out totally, it was
devastating," Gabriel says. "It was a very long, hard struggle
and I was extremely frustrated with the system and the way it
was working."
The case went through the Department of
Social Services and the courts, and Clark: Gabriel was found not
guilty at trial. Related civil charges were dismissed and his
name was removed from the registry of suspected abusers.
After her experience, Gabriel decided, "I
wanted to do whatever I could to help other people suffering the
same thing."
She founded and is chairman of VOCAL
Southern Colorado, Inc., an organization that provides
information about case procedures for families of those accused
of abuse and their attorneys, operates a hotline and works with
professionals in the child protection system. The local
membership varies, but has been as high as 90.
Gabriel is also editor of the national
organization's publication, VOCAL PerSpective.
"A lot of people think we're out there to
protect abusers", and they like to call us 'the other side,'"
Gabriel says. "We're not the other side. The other side is those
people out there who abuse kids.
Mishandling of abuse cases — in some cases
by such extremes as falsifying records — exists, Gabriel says,
and it can jeopardize cases of real abuse.
Gabriel does, of course have a life away
from VOCAL.
She’s a third-generation Colorado native,
raised in Loveland in a traditional household. "It was stable,
but very boring," Gabriel says. "I just dreamed of being able to
get out, maybe go to New York or to France."
She didn't make it to New York or France,
but she did put her lifelong love of writing to work.
She Started at TRW as an assembler,
working her way to technician and finally landing a writing job
in the technical publications department.
Gabriel is close to completing a
bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Colorado at
Colorado Springs, and she is in interested in following that
with a Ph.D. in law and psychology. She's not bored.
"I think one of the reasons I used to get
bored was because I felt there were very strict boundaries on
what I could or couldn't do," Gabriel says, noting that the
boundaries were often her own. "I was always too afraid of
failure. It was like a little box around me that said I could go
this far but no further.
"When I broke free of it I started really
enjoying life."
That's what the '90s will be, Gabriel
believes: "Getting a chance to really find out who you are,
maybe breaking out of rigid definition to explore all the
different things you want to try and finding out what you have
to offer society, the good things you can do,"
LEARNING FROM THE McMARTIN HOAX
By Dr. Lee Coleman
Slowly, begrudgingly, more and more people
are beginning to recognize that the wild charges against the
staff of the McMartin pre-school are without foundation. Even
more important, the cause of this tragedy is also being
acknowledged in some circles. Others, however, despite being in
a position to see how the hoax developed, refuse to face up to
the truth.
If what the children have said is not
true, why would they say these things? The answer is both simple
and terrible. They were trained. Trained by the “experts” our
law enforcement agencies trustingly allowed to "evaluate” the
children.
Most, influential among those defending
the way in which the children were interviewed is psychiatrist
Roland Summit. Recently, Summit has written that the McMartin
children were in fact 'the victims of sexual abuse, that social
worker Kee MacFarlane and the children's Institute International
used proper, up-to-the-minute techniques to interview the
children, and that the crumbling of the prosecution merely
points to weaknesses in the criminal justice system.
Summit argued that there was both reason
and precedent for the methods used in the initial interviews
with children'. “MacFarlane practiced the state of the
art...highly evolved, intensely specific and largely unknown
outside the fledgling specialty of child abuse diagnosis.” This
new art form, Summit continued, was “an amalgam of several
roles...the knowledge of a child development specialist to
understand and translate toddler language, a therapist to guide
and interpret interactive play," a police interrogator to
develop evidentiary confirmation and a child-abuse specialist,
to recognize, the distinctive and pathetic patterns of sexual
victimization. " We evidently need such artists to assist police
investigators because their “specialist understanding is both
unexpected and counter-intuitive."
Summit doesn't tell us whether he has
viewed any of the videotaped interviews done by MacFarlane and
her protgs; but either way, his defense of the techniques used
is itself indefensible. I don't know which is worse---defending
interviews which he has studied and which so clearly show that
the children were trained; by the interviewers to believe they
were molested, or defending interviews which he has not studied.
That the children, and, their parents,
were horribly victimized by the interviews—is a conclusion which
is inescapable. So far, I have watched the interviews of
thirteen children. In some Kee MacFarlane is the interviewer. In
others, those she has taught faithfully practice the new "art”
Summit, so highly praises. In each and every session, have seen,
so far, an outrageous pattern emerges, one in which the children
are systematically manipulated and indoctrinated until they
finally give the interviewer what he or she wants, some “yukky
secrets”.
Let us look at a few examples.
1. A five-year-old girl is introduced to
hand puppets which can "speak for the child.” MacFarlane tells
the girl that "we can pretend.” She goes on to tell the girl, I
think that something happened to you at school with Mr. Ray
(Buckey) that you don't want to talk about. “No," the child
responds.
“I think it's true, MacFarlane answers,
"I, talked to lots of your friends. All of them are telling me
the things that Mr. Ray did"
When the child still has no "secrets" to
tell, MacFarlane is not deterred. She tells the child, "He told
you not to talk, didn't he...But: all the kids are telling...You
could just show me with the dolls. You don't even have to use
words."
Even if it were true that the other
children had in fact told of these things, rather than been
manipulated into saying them, is this the way to find out if a
particular child has been victimized or witnessed others being
victimized? Hardly.
2. A four year old girl is asked by
MacFarlane, “Do you like Ray?” She responds, “No, he's bad."
“What did he do?” MacFarlane asks. The girl responds, “My mom
said he tied up kids.” Instead of helping the child understand
the difference between what her mother or anyone else may have
told her, and what she could actually remember from her own
experiences at school, MacFarlane proceeds to ask the child to
demonstrate, with dolls and rope, how the children were tied!
Not surprisingly, the child complied.
After all, children regularly use dolls to tell stories. By the
time the session was over, the child was tying dolls to legs of
chairs with the rope, and using handcuffs which were also handy.
At one point in this "fact-finding" process, 'the child said
that after Mr. Ray tied kids, her mother came and tied up kids
too! When MacFarlane asked if this was just a story, the child
agreed that she was just pretending.
Armed with these profound insights into
the operations of the McMartin school, MacFarlane and her
colleagues then proceeded to tell subsequent children that they
knew kids were being tied up at the school. Other children had
said so.
3. An eight year old boy is interviewed by
Kee MacFarlane. It has been several years since this boy
attended the school, so his memory will need an extra bit of
jogging. He is told that a lot of other kids have told about the
secrets. The ones who tell are “a big help in figuring things
out." He is told that some of the teachers did yukky things.
When he asks which teachers, he is told" that the puppets know
and they can tell the “secret machine" (microphone). When the
child, even with the puppets, fails to come forth with a secret,
the puppet on his hand is asked by the puppet on MacFarlane's
hand, "Are you dumb or smart?” The boy's puppet responds, "I'm
smart.”
The boy is nudged further by being told t
hat because the youngest children are some times unable to talk,
“we're talking to the older kids, cause they're the smartest.
They can help. We can figure out these games, if you're smart."
The boy responds, once again, “I’m smart.”
MacFarlane says, “It was a long time ago,
you might not remember... We can pretend." Now the boy says, "I
remember, but the best: he can do is talk about beating up
puppets. MacFarlane, via the bird puppet on her hand, tells the
child, "Bird says some of them are naked games." The child asks
why they played naked games.
MacFarlane responds, “It was a special
school where they play naked games. Remember?"
With MacFarlane doing the “telling,” the
boy will obviously need even more encouragement. She tells him,
"He had a meeting of the mommies and daddies of the kids. They
said how proud they were that their children had told (the
secrets). But some parents said their kids didn't tell any
secrets, so we said “sorry". Your parents talked to the other
parents, so they know the secrets and your parents said, “We
don't know if Bill [pseudonym] has a good enough memory".
To this the boy immediately blurts out,
"Well, I have a good enough memory," "To which MacFarlane
responded, "Oh, great. Was that you, Mr. Monkey? o.k. Lets
figure out a naked game. --- Later we can tell the mommies and
daddies. Oh, they will be so happy.”
With this, the child began to talk about
games he supposedly “remembered." But, alas, none of the
teachers were naked in the games he described. That would never
do.
MacFarlane: “I thought that was a naked
game."
Boy: "Not exactly"
MacFarlane: "Did somebody take their
clothes off?"
Boy : "When I was there no one was naked."
Mac Farlane: .. We want to make sure
you're not scared to tell."
Boy: "I'm not scared.”
MacFarlane: Some of the kids were told
they might be killed. It was a trick. Alt right Mr. Alligator,
are you going to be stupid, or are you smart and can tell. Some
think you're smart."
Boy: "I'll be smart."
MacFarlane: "Mr. Monkey (the puppet the
child had used earlier) is chicken. He can't remember the naked
games, but you know the naked movie star game, or is your memory
too bad?"
Boy: “I haven' t seen the naked movie star
game."
MacFarlane: "You must be dumb."
Boy: "I don't remember."
Sooner or later, most children will buckle
under this kind of onslaught, as they did in the McMartin case.
This, I submit, is child (and parent) abuse.
The techniques used on the McMartin
children point dramatically to one conclusion: MacFarlane and
her trainees had decided, before the very first interview, that
children were molested at the McMartin preschool. However they
now try to rationalize their interview techniques, their
behavior with the children looks like an attempt to squeeze from
the children "evidence" of what the interviewers were sure must
have taken place.
Summit defends this by writing, “If a
child suspected of being abused is unable to volunteer
information, it must be elicited with warm reassurance and
specific, potentially leading questions" This seems to assume
that a molestation has taken place, despite the fact that the
interview is supposed to discover whether molestation has
occurred. Tragically, this assumption of sexual abuse is
precisely the attitude that Summit, MacFarlane and other leading
lights in child sexual abuse have promoted, through countless
workshops for police, protective service workers, mental health
professionals, and district attorneys. It is this belief that if
an allegation is raised, regardless of the circumstances, it
must true because "children don't lie about sexual abuse," which
explain the irresponsible investigations in the McMartin case,
and the hundreds of other false allegations throughout the
country.
This raises other serious question. Where
does the claim that "children don’t lie about sexual abuse” come
from? Are there only two choices, that the child is either lying
or telling the truth, or does this ignore the possibility that a
child may be manipulated into an accusation, and with sufficient
training, eventually come to sincerely believe in things which
never took place? With the answers to these questions comes the
recognition that in defending Kee MacFarlane and the children's
Institute International, Summit is defending himself and the
other leaders of the “fledgling specialty" of child sexual
abuse.
In a highly influential article, Summit
has written, it has become a maxim among sexual abuse
intervention counselors and investigators that children never
fabricate the kinds of 'explicit sexual manipulations they
divulge in complaints and interrogation." Unaided by adults with
axes to grind, this is probably true most of the time. But the
evidence is now overwhelming that children may be coaxed,
prodded, and indoctrinated until they tell not only of sexual
abuse, which never took place, but about virtually any fantasy
imaginable.
Take, for example the child repeatedly
interviewed as part of the string of cases in Bakersfield, case
based on the same irresponsible interview techniques used on the
McMartin children. Eventually the child told how a mother and
father had sexually abused and then murdered their two-year-old
son. I am happy to report that the "murdered" child is alive and
well. Another child, subjected to the same indoctrination
techniques, added the district attorney and the child protection
worker to the long list of child molesters.
The Minnesota Attorney General
investigated the sex abuse hoax in Scott county, where children
told of sex rings and murders, and accused their own parents of
these heinous acts. A major conclusion of the investigation was
that "prolonged interrogation of children may result in
confusion between fact and fantasy."
For Summit to ignore such evidence, and
the obvious implications for the McMartin interviews, is
irresponsible. It seems that rather than face up to the
nightmare which the "experts" have promoted by their highly
aggressive and manipulative techniques, they are determined to
confuse the issues by claiming that (quoting Summit) "if there
is a danger out, there...we must look to sources apart from the
criminal justice system to show us the danger... Rather than
discredit MacFarlane, the criminal justice system needs to
better understand, the problem of child sexual abuse: and make
accommodations to the sources of evidence."
This means more puppets, more
"anatomically correct dolls," more testimony from three, four or
five year olds who have been so bad manipulated by interviewers
that they no longer can differentiate what they remember from
what has been suggested to them by overzealous adults.
Recently we learned of yet one more
perversion being foisted on us by the "experts": Some of the
leading authorities in child sexual abuse have been given
hundreds of thousands of federal and state dollars to study the
impact of sexual abuse, on the Mc Martin children! Among the
investigators receiving, these funds, are the very persons, who
indoctrinated the children in to believing they were molested.
Summit has, however, made one worthwhile
recommendation. He urged that the videotapes of interviews be
carefully studied no matter what happens in the criminal case.
This is precisely what needs to happen. The hundreds of hours of
videotaped interviews, are indeed the key to understanding how
the children could come to sincerely believe things that never
happened. These tapes must not be allowed to gather dust merely
because the district attorney's office finally gathered the
courage to admit that it was a terrible mistake to trust
MacFarlane and the children's Institute International.
Indeed, these tapes are a key, not only to
understanding the McMartin hoax, but the thousands of smaller;
but otherwise similar debacles unfolding throughout the country.
If, as I have seen from own viewing of the McMartin tapes and
listening to nearly two hundred hours of audio and video tapes
in other case, the ‘best and the brightest’ have created the
current mess in investigations of alleged child sexual abuse,
then some basic lessons emerge:
First, we have once again made a terrible
mistake by turning to mental health professionals for advice in
delicate and difficult issues of law and social policy. Mental
health professionals are no more qualified to investigate
whether a child has been sexually molested than to determine if
a murderer knew right from wrong, or predict if a prisoner is
safe for release.
Second, police and child protection
workers throughout the country will need to be retrained. The
ideas and methods of Summit, MacFarlane, and their closest
colleagues, which now pervade child sexual abuse investigations,
will need to be exposed and discarded in favor of careful and
responsible investigations, which do not turn to "experts" for
insights, which we mistakenly assume they can provide. We will
do far better without them. I join hands with Dr. Summit in
calling for the most thoroughgoing study of the McMartin tapes,
by the widest possible audience. Let transcriptions (with names
and identifying data removed, of course) go forth, across the
land. Once the public sees these tapes, experts will not be
needed to tell us where the "secrets" came from, and who is to
blame.
