Get an all-access pass to never-before-seen content, free digital evidence kits, and much more! Overall, the case lasted seven years, from 1984 to 1990, but in the end there wasn't a single conviction. Kee MacFarlane, an unlicensed therapist who worked with the nonprofit Children's International Institute, was hired by the Manhattan Beach district attorney's office to help investigate the. Ray Buckey went to law school, according to the, While some of those who testified in the McMartin Preschool trials maintain that they were victims of abuse, a man named Kyle Zirpolo came forward in 2005 and told the. Matusinka handed a major portion of the continuing investigation over to Kee MacFarlane, a past acquaintance who had just arrived in Los Angeles to work as consultant and trainer for Children's Institute International (CII), an agency that treated abused and neglected children. Kee MacFarlane, a social worker at the Children's Institute International, conducted interviews with hundreds of McMartin Preschool students, using sock puppets and anatomically correct dolls to help children disclose "yucky secrets." Many children initially denied being abused, according to The New York Times. Crime News is your destination for true crime stories from around the world, breaking crime news, and information about Oxygen's original true crime shows and documentaries. Parents of McMartin Preschool children panicked. According to The Witch-Hunt Narrative, there were initially 41 "actual complaints" in the trial. She and her granddaughter successfully sued the parent of one child for slander in 1991, but the plaintiffs were only awarded $1 each, according to the Los Angeles Times. If the childs anus opened during wink tests, the child had been sodomized; the further the childs anus opened, the more frequent the abuse. Afterward, she applied to have her teaching credentials reinstated, but it was initially denied. Digging through transcripts, Beck finds that MacFarlane told one 5-year-old boy youre just a scaredy cat when he repeatedly denied that he and other children had been inappropriately touched. "With his partisan recounting of the child abuse panic of the 1980s, Beck turns what could have been a careful history about one facet of the . A judge later ruled in her favor, according to the Los Angeles Times, and she resumed her teaching career. Prosecutors tried to bolster their side by providing testimony from George Freeman, a jailhouse informant, who claimed that Ray Buckey had admitted to him that he'd abused children at McMartin, but during his own testimony, Buckey claimed that he wasn't "teaching at the school during many of the times in which he was accused of abusing children." Cody said: "I said, 'Do you have an independent recollection of being abused?' Heger is now a professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California and the founder and executive director of the Violence Intervention Program, which offers social services to victims of family violence and sexual assault. But Sandusky got away with serially molesting young boys for years not because people mistrusted childrens accusations, but because those accusations were covered up by the corrupt bureaucracy at the university. 2023 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. Even the retrial ended in a majority acquittal. By the time preliminary hearings were beginning in August, prosecutors were telling the media that almost 400 sexual crimes had been committed and that at least 30 additional people at McMartin Preschool were under investigation, neither of which were true. According to We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, Peggy McMartin, the administrator of the school, believed that Johnson must have been experiencing "enormous stress to do something so rash." Johnson believed one of his teachers, Ray Buckey, had sodomized the boy with his thermometer.. But many of the stories, pursued with zeal through the courts, were false and extremely destructive. A pediatrician who medically examined and photographed the children involved in the investigation, Astrid Heger testified she found physical evidence of molestation in 10 of 13 alleged victims, according to the, . The trial dragged on for nearly three years. Dr. Astrid Heger also concluded that 80 percentof the children had been abused, though this conclusion wasn't based on physical evidence. They ritually sacrificed babies. The photographic method she developed has been successfully used in hundreds of molestation cases. / KCAL News. but she stood by her findings. Also arrested were Buckeys mother, sister Peggy Ann Buckey, and several co-workers, who were charged with a combined 115 counts later increased to 321, according to The New York Times. But parents and child protection groups weren't the only ones up in arms. By 1989, the number of charges had been reduced to 64, and the trial dragged on, according to the Los Angeles Times. MANHATTAN BEACH (CBSLA.com) It's been 30 years since allegations of child molestation at a Manhattan Beach preschool shocked the country. "Once the parents began to believe that there had been crimes committed, then the case got very heated," Cody said. In January 1990, Buckey was acquitted on most of the charges, with the jury deadlocked on another 13 counts, according to, . But as Johnson continued to question her son, he "admitted that he thought Ray had once taken his temperature.". Children described being molested by groups of men and women, including teachers at McMartin Preschool, in public bathrooms, the backroom of a meat market or in tunnels beneath the school, according to People. Kevin Cody, whose newspaper The Easy Reader covered the case, told CBSLA.comthat he has spoken to multipleof the children, whom he describes as happy, well-adjusted people. She was then released on almost $300,000 bail, according to, . He was retried later that year, resulting in a mistrial and all charges being dismissed, according to the, . She would later claim that her dog had been sodomized and that her estranged husband molested one of their children, according to The Washington Post. Over the course of a decade, seven teachers were arrested on more than 300 charges of child molestation and conspiracy, leading to the longest and costliest criminal trial in U.S. history, according to, Virginia McMartin opened her first preschool in 1956 at age 49, after separating from the father of her two children, according to, In the summer of 1983, Manhattan Beach police received a phone call from Judy Johnson, whose younger son was a student at McMartin Preschool. "The children are doing great," Cody said. [3] In the time leading up to the McMartin preschool trial, MacFarlane described herself as a psychotherapist but lacked any professional licenses. Kee MacFarlane, Self: Strong Kids, Safe Kids. [4] Charges against the defendants eventually were dropped. Soon after, other parents of children under Buckeys care at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach alerted police that their children had confessed to being fondled, sodomized, and forced to participate in pornographic films. Beck attributes societys unwavering belief in the 80s child sex abuse cases to a number of forces that came together in America at that time: a conservative backlash against the counterculture that had dominated the 60s and 70s, with its rejection of law enforcement and authority; a similar backlash against the sexual revolution and feminism, which dismantled the nuclear family, sending women to work and children to day-care centers; homophobia linked to the AIDS epidemic and an attendant fear that men who were caretakers outside the home were pedophiles; the rise of conservative Christian evangelicals, many of whom had helped elect President Ronald Reagan and feared the proliferation of pornography. At least 11 children told stories of secret rooms separated by tunnels, often underground and without windows. [3] She developed the concept of the anatomically correct doll for children to use during interviews concerning abuse and played a significant role in the McMartin trial. A jury found the mother and son not guilty of 52 counts of child molestation, but remained deadlocked on 12 molestation charges against Ray Buckey, as well as a single count of conspiracy against Ray and Peggy, according to AP News. Peggy Ann Buckey, Ray Buckeys sister, was a high school special education teacher who occasionally helped out at her grandmothers preschool. The charges were dropped after the district attorney determined there was insufficient evidence to prove her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, according to the Los Angeles Times. The CII investigation methods, such as its suggestive and leading questions to children and its use of dolls, would eventually be discredited. She said she turned to a co-worker, Sandra Krebbs, and said, My God, Sandy, hes gotten wind of the case., He knew a lot of things about this case, she said. Social worker Kee MacFarlane conducted and oversaw interviews, using sock puppets and anatomically correct dolls to make the children open up, reported, Children described being molested by groups of men and women, including teachers at McMartin Preschool, in public bathrooms, the backroom of a meat market or in tunnels beneath the school, according to, On March 22, 1984, seven employees of the McMartin Preschool were indicted, including Virginia McMartin, then 76, Peggy McMartin Buckey, Peggy Ann Buckey, Ray Buckey, and employees Mary Ann Jackson, Babette Spitler and Betty Raidor. Buckey would spend the next five years in jail before being released in 1989 on $1.5 million bail. Another student named Kyle Zirpolo told the Los Angeles Times in 2005 that he had fabricated the allegations. On Aug. 1, 1990, the Los Angeles Times reported the case had come to its final end, as Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg declared, The case of the People vs. Raymond Buckey is hereby dismissed, and the defendant is discharged.. Sign up forOxygen Insiderfor all the best true crime content. Social worker Kee MacFarlane conducted and oversaw interviews, using sock puppets and anatomically correct dolls to make the children open up, reported People Magazine. Seven McMartin Preschool employees were arrested and charged with more than 300 counts of molestation and conspiracy, and by the end of the preliminary trial hearing, charges had been dropped against five of the them. McMartin died in 1995 at 88 after suffering a series of strokes, according to, Before her arrest, Peggy McMartin Buckey, Virginias daughter, was the main administrator of McMartin Preschool. Superior Court Judge William Pounders said the defense had not shown that it was relevant to the trial. Ultimately only 41 of the original 360 children testified during the grand jury and pretrial hearings, and fewer than a dozen testified during the actual trial. The letter asked parents to ask their children about potential sexual abuse and suggested that photos may have been taken of naked children. You must be dumb, she added, speaking to him through a puppet. The organization provided counseling and therapy to 400 former McMartin students and helped determine if abuse had occurred. The number of convictions that came out of these cases, almost all of which were eventually overturned, shows how easily we can deceive ourselves and othershow the pursuit of justice results in gross injusticewhen the truth is preconceived. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. Medical evidence was also repeatedly contradictory. Peggy Buckey's bail was set at $1 million. Want to Read. The jury found the mother and son not guilty on 52 counts of child molestation, but remained deadlocked on 12 molestation charges against Ray Buckey and a single count of conspiracy against Ray and Peggy, according to the Associated Press. He . One poll showed that 87 percent of respondents thought that the Buckeys were guilty. Social worker Kee MacFarlane conducted and oversaw interviews, using sock puppets and anatomically correct dolls to make the children open up, reported People Magazine. The only animal found was a tortoise shell, but there's evidence that the shell was a fraud and was "deliberately planted by someone wishing to incriminate Ray Buckey." The young children in the McMartin case also underwent forensic testing developed by a physician named Bruce Woodling: anal examinations (wink tests) in which he swabbed a spot near the patients anus that supposedly determined abuse. Key McFarlane, the director of CII at the time, examined and videotaped approximately 400 children using anatomically correct dolls. A wave of scandals about brutal child sex abuse in the 1980s caused widespread panic. She was among those indicted and arrested in March 1984. Beck points out that corroborating evidence then became a superfluous adjunct to a truth the therapist already knew.. In the end, charges were dropped against five, and the remaining two went to trial, but they were ultimately acquitted. , prosecutors determined there was insufficient evidence to prove them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. McMartin hadn't met Johnson or her son previously, but she decided to let him stay. When the McMartin trial finally ended in 1990 with no convictions, the McMartin family filed a slander suit against one parent who led the witch hunt in Manhattan Beach back in 1983. "Perhaps, it started as a misreading of an innocent act " said Danny Davis, who represented Ray Buckey, who was tried with his mother, Peggy. Although Ray Buckey was released the same day he was arrested based on lack of evidence, since Judy Johnson claimed that her son had provided the names of two other children at the school who were being abused, the police decided to reach out to parents for further evidence. In December 1985, the decision was made to drop the charges against everyone except Ray and Peggy Buckey. She was the Director of Children's Institute International. Satz was fired by KABC-TV last year in a dispute unrelated to the McMartin case. Rubin reflected on the many changes that came about as a result of the McMartin trial, which affected criminal cases across the country. On March 22, 1984, seven employees of the McMartin Preschool were indicted, including Virginia McMartin, then 76, Peggy McMartin Buckey, Peggy Ann Buckey, Ray Buckey, and employees Mary Ann Jackson, Babette Spitler and Betty Raidor. Five McMartin teachers were ultimately arrested and charged, along with the schools administrator, Peggy McMartin Buckey, and its 76-year-old founder, Virginia McMartin, with what detectives and child therapists determined was ritualistic satanic abuse. Ray Buckey was tried once more, but the second trial was a comparatively expedited version of the first trial, "involving only eight counts of molestation and three children." Her controversial techniques have inspired new protocols in child psychology. Although many of the stories involved repeated claims of secret passageways under the school, archeological excavations found nothing. Neither Ray nor Peggy were ultimately convicted of any crime. But the hysteria ultimately obscured whether or not Arnold was guilty of abuse. In 1990, she was found not guilty of all charges, saying, Ive gone through hell, and now we've lost everything, according to The Washington Post. Kathleen (Kee) MacFarlane Elias, 41, director of the child sexual abuse center at Children's Institute International in Los Angeles, testified during her long stay on the witness stand that she. According to The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic, Johnson claimed that her son had come home with "a reddened anus and spent the night restless and whiny, finally responding to his mother's relentless questioning by saying the Buckey had taken his temperature recently." The trial was repeatedly criticized for the inconsistencies in its testimonies, the coercion of witness testimonies, and for withholding exculpatory evidence. 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