Exhaustive Sex Case Inquiry Told : McMartin Flaw: Gaps in Evidence

Some of the top prosecutors in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, asked to help decide if there was enough evidence to take all seven defendants to trial in the McMartin Pre-School molestation case, were troubled by one question: Why were there no photographs?

Many of the alleged child victims in the case had testified that their teachers had taken pornographic pictures of them. The FBI had hunted; so had local police and district attorney’s investigators. The search had been nationwide. Pedophiles had been questioned; informants alerted; a “buy” was even arranged. But no photographs had been found. Was it because the search had been launched too late and any photographs had been destroyed? Or because no photos had existed?

A Disturbing Pattern

None of the prosecutors knew for sure. But for Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, the lack of photographs was part of an increasingly disturbing pattern--an inability to substantiate children’s accounts that mass molestations had occurred at the Manhattan Beach nursery school.

This broader lack of corroboration, of which the lack of photographs is an example, played a major role in Reiner’s recent decision that five of the seven McMartin defendants were “probably not guilty” and should not be made to stand trial.

Reiner and his prosecutors were sure that some molestations had occurred; there was medical evidence to back that up. But just how many of the hundreds of children who said they had been molested had in fact been molested--and by whom--were still open questions.

Reiner grappled with those questions for months, while the preliminary hearing for the seven defendants ground along in Los Angeles Municipal Court, before deciding that perhaps only about 14 children had been victimized and that only two defendants, Raymond Buckey and his mother, Peggy, were “probably guilty.”

Finally, just before Christmas, Reiner and a dozen of his top lawyers closeted themselves for two days and nights--living on deli sandwiches, pizza and leftovers in office refrigerators--while they debated the strengths and weaknesses of their case and the fates of the seven defendants, much like a jury would weigh a verdict.

Reiner’s Decision Alone

A clear consensus emerged. But in the end it was Reiner’s decision alone to vastly reduce the scope of what he had thought of as “the case of the century” when he inherited it upon taking office in December, 1984.

The McMartin case began in the fall of 1983, when the mother of a 2-year-old boy told Manhattan Beach police that her son had been molested by a teacher at the school--”Mr. Ray.” The report seemed routine, and local police decided to save time by sending a letter to other McMartin parents, informing them that their children also might have been molested.

Alarmed parents soon overwhelmed police, and the district attorney’s office stepped in. Prosecutors referred parents to a little-known Los Angeles sex abuse center--Children’s Institute International--for medical exams and interviews using puppets, dolls and games.

There, social workers evaluated hundreds of children and videotaped the interviews for prosecutors to review. Without much further investigation, then-Dist. Atty. Robert H. Philibosian took the case to a grand jury. Shortly after indictments were returned, and again without much more investigation, his office doubled the number of charges against the teachers.

There was such a sense of urgency about the case--with shocked parents and the news media pressing for quick answers--that prosecutors did not take time to view the institute’s videotapes or to interview many of the children themselves. Instead, they relied on social workers’ accounts.

Signs of a Problem

When prosecutors finally viewed the tapes, they realized they had a problem. In many instances, the social workers appeared to have led children into making what the interviewers described as “disclosures” of sexual abuse. Of the 384 children whom social workers saw, 349 ultimately confided “yucky secrets.” According to a transcript, this, for example, was part of the experience of Child No. 184, as she was interviewed on videotape.:

“We also need to remember that all the mommies and daddies got tricked,” said the social worker. “You know how they got tricked?”

“How?” asked the 8-year-old girl.

“They thought it was a really good preschool,” said the social worker. “. . . They didn’t know about that yucky stuff. So the mommies and daddies got tricked too, just like the kids. Remember I told you 183 kids?”

“183,” said the girl.

“183 and they all got tricked,” said the social worker.

When the preliminary hearing began, the district attorney planned to call 41 such children to testify. Defense attorneys, contending that the children had been brainwashed by overzealous social workers, were intent on showing in court that children could be made to say anything.

One 10-year-old was kept on the witness stand for 16 days, with defense attorneys hammering away at him until they elicited a string of fresh, seemingly improbable accusations. He testified not only that he had been molested by seven teachers at school and watched two of them have sex, but also that he had been forced to drink blood during a satanic ritual at an Episcopal church and had been molested at a neighborhood grocery store.

That child’s ordeal as a witness convinced many parents to withdraw their children from the case. “People would hold him up and say, ‘I can’t let my kid do that,’ ” recalled Deputy Dist. Atty. Lael Rubin, the head of the three-member prosecution team.

Top district attorney’s officials believed at first that the large number of similar accounts by alleged victims were in themselves corroborative. But as bizarre testimony mounted, they began to think that they might not have all the facts.

Reiner, who had defeated Philibosian at the polls in November, 1984, summoned the prosecution team to a strategy session the following March. At the meeting, which also included experienced prosecutors and investigators not involved in the case, Reiner learned that even some members of his team had doubts.

Large Numbers

“There was a lack of corroboration that was hard to explain,” he recalled. “It’s one thing to have a single incident that is not corroborated. But when you’re dealing with such large numbers, the lack of corroboration (became) more and more disquieting.”

However, no serious consideration was given to dropping the case, participants said. But Reiner said he began to “pound into that one thing (asking repeatedly): ‘Where is the corroboration for this?’ ”

Some in Reiner’s office feared that “all of the publicity had caused some of the children to jump in and say ‘Yes, yes, yes’ ” they had been molested, said Jack B. White, chief of the district attorney’s bureau of investigation.

“Our marching orders were to do our best to resolve the issues one way or the other. . . . The idea was, it would be unfortunate to leave questions about what happened at McMartin and who did what.”

An outside child abuse expert--a veteran Los Angeles Police Department juvenile officer--had already been hired by the district attorney’s bureau of investigation to interview the children. Efforts were redoubled to find the pornographic photos that many of the children had mentioned.

Widespread Inquiry

Investigators sought to interview friends of the defendants, everyone who had ever worked at McMartin, their neighbors, people who lived near places children testified that the teachers had taken them.

Investigators also traced McMartin children who had moved away. They found some in Hawaii and other parts of California, but all had been “contaminated” by news accounts, White said.

Prompted by parents, investigators even conducted an archeological dig on the school grounds and an adjacent vacant lot in search of animal bones from sacrifices the children had described.

“I believe if you look back over the case, you could not find a thing we did not follow up,” White said. But they came up empty-handed.

By June, the preliminary hearing appeared to be all but over. All but 18 of the originally scheduled 41 child witnesses had been pulled out of the case. Most had been removed by their parents, but some had been dropped by prosecutors, who had enough bizarre testimony without them.

Parents of five of the remaining witnesses were waiting for a ruling on whether testimony would be allowed by closed-circuit television. The parents had fought for and won passage of a state law allowing it, but the judge in the preliminary hearing, Aviva K. Bobb, had ruled the law did not apply to the McMartin case. It took months--until early October--for a higher court to rule that it did apply and for Bobb to apply it. Only one child ultimately testified by closed-circuit television.

Reiner had become “increasingly skeptical of the evidence” but did not make a final decision until the end of the preliminary hearing, which was delayed when the defense, in an unusual move, elected to call witnesses of its own.

Reiner’s advisers wanted to hear what the defense had to say.

Detailed Assessments

“I was in favor of vigorously prosecuting seven people until the preliminary hearing was over,” said Assistant Dist. Atty. Curt Livesay, the office’s third-ranking prosecutor, “because at the end of the preliminary hearing, (I knew there would be) no more evidence that I could look forward to analyzing.”

While the hearing was drawing to a close, the three prosecutors, Deputy Dist. Attys. Lael Rubin, Glenn Stevens and Christine Johnston, were preparing their own detailed assessments of the case for Reiner.

These were delivered at a 30-hour, weekend meeting in mid-December in Reiner’s conference room in at the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles. The following account was pieced together from interviews with nine people who were there.

Prosecutor Stevens went first, analyzing the truthfulness and usefulness of four of the 14 child witnesses. He reviewed inconsistencies in their statements to therapists, parents, police, prosecutors, the grand jury and the court. He analyzed medical evidence: If a child said he had been assaulted in a certain manner, how sure were doctors that they could confirm it? He also analyzed stories of other children who had attended the nursery school at the same time, looking for similarities or contrasts.

Stevens’ assessment of the case took, by various accounts, from five to eight hours. And at the end, he gave his analysis of the overall case:

Findings of Study

He told Reiner and 13 lawyers, including most of the top prosecutors in the district attorney’s office, that he believed only two of the seven defendants--Raymond Buckey and his mother--should be taken to trial, and that charges against the other five should be dropped.

Johnston went next, analyzing another four children in depth. She recommended that only Raymond Buckey be taken to trial and that charges against the other six be dropped.

Finally Rubin, the head of the prosecution team, made her presentation. She analyzed the remaining child witnesses and suggested that charges against four defendants be dropped.

Rubin was reported to be certain that Judge Bobb would order all seven defendants to stand trial, as she ultimately did.

But Rubin said she favored proceeding only against Ray Buckey, his mother and long-time teacher Betty Raidor.

Question to Prosecutors

The rest of those assembled, possessing among them hundreds of years of prosecutorial experience, functioned as a sort of jury.

“I went around at the end and asked everybody in the room: ‘Do you think we should (go to trial)?’ ” Reiner recalled. “ ‘What is your recommendation on this (defendant) and why?’

“I said that we have a legal policies manual that sets our criteria for the cases we file. And that criteria is we have to have a strong probability of conviction.

“I said that’s a fine policy when it is applied to 250,000 cases filed year in and year out, that this office obviously can’t be filing cases that people agree are going to be lost because of various weaknesses in them, but that is not going to be the policy that we are going to use in this particular case.

“The criteria that we use here is to address ourselves to one question and one question only, and that is ‘Do you believe, in your own personal assessment, that this person is probably guilty?’

“If you can come to that threshold and say, not that you’re convinced beyond a reasonable doubt . . . but . . . yes, I believe this defendant is probably guilty . . . it matters not what your assessment is of the likelihood of conviction. This is a case that has to be tried if you believe the defendants are probably guilty.”

Nearly Unanimous

It was nearly unanimous, participants said. All but Rubin, in the end, agreed that charges should be dropped against five.

“There was a big difference in the quantity and quality of proof for those five and for (Buckey and his mother),” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan Murphy, assistant director of the office’s bureau of special operations. “There was a big line you could draw.”

Numbers alone told part of the story. While 14 child witnesses accused Ray Buckey and 10 accused his mother, there was a dramatic fall-off after that, with, for example, six accusing Betty Raidor and only one accusing Mary Ann Jackson.

Other factors, including fears that words might have been put into a child’s mouth--either by parents, playmates, social workers, investigators, lawyers or exposure to publicity--also figured in the evaluations. Accordingly, the prosecutors weighed the spontaneity of their allegations and how early--or late--in the investigation they had been made.

The McMartin case review was the most exhaustive the participants could recall, but it still failed to turn up a conclusive answer to what happened at the school.

“There never is a definitive answer to these kinds of things,” said Reiner. “(But) everything that could humanly be discovered about this over a period of two years . . . was brought in, was publicly presented (at a preliminary hearing) for everybody in the world to take a look at. And this is what it amounts to when you look at it very carefully. We are not talking about hundreds and hundreds of victims. (We’re talking 13, 14 kids) over an extended period of time.”

But asked whether she still believes that hundreds of children were molested, Rubin--privy to the same evidence as Reiner and face-to-face contact with parents and children--smiled sadly and said, “Yes.”