Boy, 7, to Take Stand This Week : First Child Set to Testify in McMartin Abuse Case

A 7-year-old boy identified only by his first name and last initial is scheduled to clamber atop a booster chair on the witness stand this week as the first child to testify in the Virginia McMartin Pre-School molestation case.

The child’s account of what allegedly happened to him at the Manhattan Beach nursery school several years ago comes nearly six months after the start of the combined preliminary hearing for the school’s owner and six former teachers on 208 counts of child molestation and conspiracy.

The accused are Virginia McMartin, 77, her daughter, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 58, and grandchildren, Raymond Buckey, 26, and Peggy Ann Buckey, 28, together with Betty Raidor, 65, Mary Ann Jackson, 57, and Babette Spitler, 36. They are charged with molesting 41 students since 1978, the period covered by the statute of limitations.

The combined preliminary hearing for all seven defendants began in August. But the children’s testimony has been delayed and postponed repeatedly as the courts, the district attorney’s office, the seven-member defense team and the press wrangled over how that testimony would be presented and who would see it.

The McMartin case began to unfold 17 months ago, when Raymond Buckey was arrested on suspicion of child molestation but then released for lack of evidence. Six months later, last March, he and the other six defendants were indicted for felony child molestation. Additional charges were added later.

Buckey’s preliminary hearing began in June, then started over again two months later when a consolidated hearing was ordered for all seven defendants. Throughout the fall and winter, the court was occupied with legal arguments that pitted the rights of alleged victims, witnesses and defendants against one another.

Those arguments centered on whether the hearing, or parts of it, should be closed, whether the children could testify by closed-circuit television and whether defense attorneys could question expert witnesses on their private lives.

As the first child prepared to testify, the defense made a last-minute attempt last week to close the hearing to the public and the press. However, Municipal Judge Aviva K. Bobb ruled Friday that public access to the proceedings would not create “a reasonable likelihood of substantial prejudice” against the defendants and interfere with their right to a fair trial.

Attorney Daniel Davis, who represents key defendant Raymond Buckey, a pale and gawky young man in glasses who smiles frequently during the proceedings, had asked Bobb to reconsider her four earlier decisions to keep the hearing open.

Davis cited a Dec. 31 opinion by the California Supreme Court, in another case, that held that a defendant is entitled to a closed preliminary hearing to protect his right to a fair trial if he can establish such a likelihood.

Attorneys for four of the defendants argued that extensive publicity by “a voracious, often unpredictable, media monster” would make a fair trial impossible.

However, attorneys for The Times, The Daily Breeze and three television networks argued that widespread interest in the case does not translate into prejudice, and urged the judge to “use a scalpel, not a machete,” in deciding which parts, if any, of the hearing should be closed.

The judge ruled that reporters and spectators will be allowed to watch the proceedings from an adjacent courtroom on two television monitors, but will see only the view captured by a camera in a rear corner of the courtroom.

Prosecutors, however, will have another camera trained directly on the child testifying, to videotape the proceedings for possible use if the case goes to trial.

Waiting to Testify

Special arrangements have been made for the young witnesses, who range in age from 5 to 10. They will wait their turn to testify in a toy-filled “playroom” created behind the courtroom. The witness stand will be provided with a booster chair, and Bobb said the stand’s platform will be raised and a part of the judicial bench removed to provide better vision.

However, the children will not be allowed to testify by closed-circuit television, which had been sought by prosecutors so that the youngsters would not have to directly confront the defendants.

Bobb, relying on a recent state appeal court decision that held that there is no statute authorizing such a procedure, said the children must testify in front of her and those they have accused of molesting, photographing and threatening them.

However, each child will be allowed to have a “support” person, such as a parent or therapist, with him in the courtroom, she said.

(Television tough guy Mr. T injected a Hollywood touch into the proceedings last week by offering to accompany any youngsters frightened at having to face their accused molesters. But the district attorney’s office declined his offer, explaining that the TV personality’s presence might detract from the seriousness of the proceedings.

One relieved defense attorney said: “It really is difficult to go up against Mr. T.”)

Parents, prosecutors and children’s rights advocates are pressing for an emergency bill in the state Legislature to provide authority for closed-circuit testimony, but consideration of the proposal was postponed Tuesday for a week after falling one vote short of passage in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Should the measure be enacted, defense attorneys said, they will challenge its constitutionality.

Last week, pediatrician Astrid Heger concluded more than two weeks of testimony and cross-examination. The physician is affiliated with County-USC Medical Center and Children’s Institute International, a child-abuse diagnostic and treatment center where many of the children first disclosed that they had been molested.

She testified that she found physical evidence of sexual abuse in 29 of the 34 children she examined who are involved in the case. She said she found scars indicative of sodomy in the prosecution’s first child witness.

(Pediatricians from Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center and UCLA have testified that they found similar evidence in three other children who had attended the McMartin school. The remaining four of the 41 complaining witnesses did not have physical examinations, prosecutors said).

Defense attorneys attempted to show that Heger was biased by playing excerpts from a videotaped interview of a 6-year-old girl in which Heger insisted that “every little boy and every little girl at that school got (sexually) touched like that” and urged the child to “get down to business” and confide her secrets, although the child continued to insist that she had not been molested.

Heger also was cross-examined about her own childhood, but she refused to answer questions about whether she had ever been molested. Defense attorney asked similar questions of a second female expert witness, who also refused to answer.