Testimony Clouds Issues in Greenup Molestation Trial

She never said she had been molested by her school principal, the 11-year-old girl calmly testified. Nor had she told a police detective that she had seen the man fondle other children.

And the detective’s report “didn’t really look like what I’d said,” the poised youngster told a Los Angeles Superior Court jury hearing the case against the principal, Campbell Hugh Greenup.

However, moments later, as Deputy Dist. Atty. Kenneth R. Freeman cross-examined the child, she began to lose her composure. Her eyes filled with tears and she could scarcely manage more than a choked whisper.

Between sobs, she admitted that she had told Los Angeles Police Detective Steve Hales that Greenup had put his hands inside her pants while she was sitting in his lap and that she had seen him do the same thing to other children.

But, the girl added, she had said so only because that was what the officer seemed to want to hear.

The tearful inconsistencies from the 11-year-old, the 50th defense witness, came last Thursday in one of the more recent dramatic moments in Greenup’s trial, which is now ending its third month before Judge David A. Horowitz.

Deputy Public Defender Henry J. Hall says he plans to call about 50 more witnesses on behalf of Greenup, 59, who is accused of molesting eight female pupils at his small Northridge private elementary school between 1978 and 1984. The defendant himself has not yet taken the stand.

Strict Disciplinarian

For the most part, the parents and children called by the defense have told similar stories. Staunch admirers of Greenup, the parents have portrayed him as a strict disciplinarian who was unpopular with many students, especially those who misbehaved, and as a victim of public hysteria over the McMartin Pre-School molestation case.

For example, when police detectives came to Cary Baker’s house to question her about the allegations against Greenup, the mother testified:

“I told them I thought the entire thing was a witch hunt and a crock. . . . This occurred shortly after McMartin, which had gotten so much hype. People were looking for child molesters under every rug.”

The children testifying for the defense, including Baker’s son, now 14, have maintained that they never saw Greenup do anything improper.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Freeman, however, has tried to impeach these witnesses by showing that the parents siding with Greenup were so loyal to him that they never bothered to investigate the charges for themselves. The prosecutor has also suggested that the alleged crimes took place out of the viewing range of many of the child witnesses.

Among Greenup’s strongest supporters are the parents of the 11-year-old girl who broke down on the stand. After Detective Hales told her that her daughter had been molested, the mother said, she was too overwrought to speak to the child. Instead, she testified, she waited for her husband to come home from work.

The parents and daughter testified that as soon as the father arrived, he questioned the girl. When she denied having been molested, he sat her on his lap and reached inside her pants to grab her buttocks. “ ‘Did Dr. Greenup do this?’ ” he said he asked her. When she answered ‘no,’ the father testified, he was satisfied. “I just think my daughter would tell me everything,” he said.

Two days later, the mother took her child to school. After hugging Greenup, the mother assured him, according to her testimony, “ ‘We’re with you all the way, whatever happened.’ ” She and two other mothers kept Greenup’s school open after his arrest in April, 1984, until it was permanently closed in June.

Although both the mother and child subsequently granted television interviews and spoke with Greenup’s defense attorneys, the parents never allowed the girl to be questioned further by either police investigators or Freeman. They rejected the offer of a district attorney’s investigator to have the girl interviewed by a therapist.

“She’d talked enough,” the mother said. “She’d said her stuff. And we believed her. And that was all.”

Praise for Principal

Although neither of the 11-year-old’s parents was asked why they hold Greenup in such high esteem, other parents have praised the dedication they observed during frequent unannounced visits to the school.

“One of the things that impressed me the most,” Baker testified, “(was) the caring attitude he had toward the students. . . .”

In addition, these parents have endorsed Greenup’s strict methods. While the prosecution has sought to show that the defendant locked children in the closet and hit them on the head with clipboards, the defense witnesses have testified that the closet was not locked and that pencils, not clipboards, were used to “pop (the children) on the head to get their attention,” as parent and part-time teacher Carol Brookins put it.

In presenting his case, Hall has emphasized police interviewing techniques in an effort to show that the children were pressured into helping detectives build a case against Greenup.

Suggest Intimidation

Parent witnesses have suggested that police officers intimidated the young girls by talking to them outside the presence of their parents, showing them badges, telling them that Greenup was a “bad guy” and reporting the responses of other children.

The only expert defense witness Hall has put on the witness stand, Michael Paul Maloney, a clinical psychologist who is an associate professor of psychiatry at USC School of Medicine, testified recently that children, especially the very young, automatically tend to view police officers as “good guys.”

”. . . Children do have in many of these cases some expectation of what the interviewer wants,” Maloney testified. “And frequently children attempt to acquiesce and please.”

Maloney also described a phenomenon psychologists refer to as “cross-germination” in which children might be more likely to say they were molested if they were told that other children had made similar reports.

Long Time Involved

Hall, in an interview, explained that he decided to call 100 witnesses because the prosecution had not pinned down the specific dates when the alleged crimes were committed. Therefore, he said, it was necessary to cover a long period of time with many witnesses.

“You have to hope,” Hall said, “that if you have enough people saying, ‘I was there and nothing happened,’ that the jury will believe that.”