McMartin Case Teacher Wins Fight to Adopt Boy

Fifteen months after the charges against her were dropped in what was once the nation’s most notorious child molestation case, former McMartin Pre-School teacher Babette Spitler took a last giant step Friday toward “putting the pieces back together.”

A Van Nuys Superior Court judge gave her back what had been taken away from her nearly 2 1/2 years ago--Donny, the little boy the Spitlers were trying to adopt when she was arrested.

“Nothing will bring back the time we’ve been apart,” said the soft-spoken Spitler, only hours after Judge S.S. Schwartz signed the custody papers. “Now we’re just going to make every day the best we possibly can.”

Spitler, 39, and her husband, Donald, had been in the process of adopting the blue-eyed boy when she and six others were arrested in connection with the McMartin investigation in March, 1984. The adoption proceedings were halted and Donny, then 2, was placed in the first of a series of foster homes.

Her two natural children, Wendy, now 15, and Chad, 11, were put in foster homes later that summer. Only after charges were dismissed against Spitler in January, 1986, were the older children returned to the couple.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office dismissed child-abuse charges against her and four others--school matriarch Virginia McMartin; her granddaughter, Peggy Ann Buckey, and teachers Betty Raider and Mary Ann Jackson--after deciding that there was not enough evidence to convict them of any wrongdoing.

Jury selection in the case against the two remaining defendants--Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son, Raymond--is scheduled to get under way in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday. Spitler said she has offered to testify in their behalf.

Speaking in her attorney’s office Friday, Spitler said her only thought on her release was how to get her children back. It took two months for authorities to return Chad and Wendy, and then the fight for Donny began.

“I didn’t think this little one would ever be back with us . . . but I didn’t care what it took,” she said.

The first step was to petition the county Department of Adoptions to see if the boy was still available. He was.

‘Damaged Goods’

“I have a sense that potential adoptive parents learned that he had been in the home of a McMartin defendant,” said Spitler’s lawyer, Eliseo Guana. “I’m guessing a lot of adoptive parents were thinking, well, maybe we’d be adopting damaged goods.”

Guana said the department’s subsequent investigation of Spitler and her home was “the most rigorous, extensive and all-inclusive investigation. . . . McMartin was very much on their minds.”

“They concluded she had never . . . been involved in any child molestation of her own children and any other children,” she said.

Said Spitler: “The monster isn’t such a monster, after all.”

With a positive report from adoption workers, the proceedings in Schwartz’s chambers were little more than a formality.

“It was a happy ending,” Guana said, “and also a message to many other doubting Thomases out there. It lets them know this lady has probably been investigated more than any other adoptive parents in the state of California. . . . This is the final seal of approval for a family that deserves to be united.”

The Spitlers, meanwhile, have moved outside of Los Angeles County, where they are trying to put the past behind them.

Remains at Home

Donald Spitler continues to work as a county lifeguard, while his wife remains at home “curing and tending to the wounds of the last three years,” Guana said.

Donny, after being moved from foster home to foster home, finally is beginning to realize that he has a home and a permanent family, the Spitlers said.

“It’s over but yet it’s not over,” Babette Spitler said. “There are going to be definite scars. . . . I have them. This little one has them. My older two have them.

“But we always knew we loved each other. . . . They couldn’t take that away from us.”