‘Trust, Betrayal’ Cited as McMartin Trial Opens

In a terse opening statement, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lael Rubin summarized the McMartin Pre-School molestation case Monday as a matter “about trust and betrayal of trust” and asked jurors to find Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son, Raymond, guilty of sexually abusing 14 children who attended the family-run Manhattan Beach nursery school.

Spectators, who included parents of alleged victims and the defendants’ husband and father, packed the courtroom as the case that has taken four years and $6 million to get to trial finally began. The trial in Los Angeles Superior Court is expected to last at least a year.

Raymond Buckey, 29, is charged with 79 counts of molestation; his 60-year-old mother with 20. Both are also charged with a combined count of conspiracy.

The entire court day had been reserved for the prosecution, but in remarks that took only 35 minutes, Rubin told the seven-man, five-woman jury--selected from 500 prospective panelists--that the teachers had occupied a position of special trust with the children, their parents and the beach community itself.

“These parents will tell you that they blindly put their trust and faith in these two defendants,” she told jurors, the majority of whom are parents. “They didn’t question, didn’t ask, didn’t piece together clues they were getting from their children. That they didn’t . . . will sear their hearts for a long, long time.”

Display of Photographs

Using a display of large color photographs showing the children as preschoolers and as they appear today, the prosecutor introduced the alleged victims and the number of counts to which each will testify.

She said they were touched genitally, penetrated with fingers and penis, forced to participate in oral copulation, photographed in the nude, made to play “naked games,” threatened with death and bodily harm and transported to other locations for activities aimed at the “arousing of, appealing to and gratifying the sexual desires” of the teachers.

The case began in August of 1983, she said, with a report, confirmed by a physical exam, that a 2 1/2-year-old boy at the school had been molested.

Shortly after Raymond Buckey’s March, 1984, arrest, he shared a cell at Men’s Central Jail with a convicted burglar who, Rubin said, will testify that Buckey admitted that he had sodomized a 2 1/2-year-old and had sex with other children, had taken photographs and had threatened the children in order to keep them silent.

Rubin said the children’s claims about “traumatic events that were repulsive and embarrassing” will be bolstered by medical evidence from at least five doctors who examined McMartin children and by testimony from parents who observed puzzling physical and behavioral changes in their youngsters while they were enrolled at the school.

She said that although the investigation “may have been complicated” by the actions of well-meaning “parents, police and interviewers at Children’s Institute International,” a Los Angeles child abuse center, “you will learn that these these children do remember events which occurred when they were 3, 4 or 5 years old.”

The witnesses now range in age from 8 to 12.

Outside court after Monday’s brief session, the defense, which will present its opening statement today, labeled the prosecution’s statement “deceptive” and “yesterday’s mashed potatoes.”

May Have Been Molested

Lawyer Daniel Davis, who represents Raymond Buckey, said evidence indicates that three children from McMartin may have been molested, but not by his client. He warned that “I will not be brief” in explaining his client’s case to the jury.

“To tell the jury that the road map is that simple, that the puzzle is pieced together that easily, is deceptive,” Davis said.

Attorney Dean Gits, who represents Peggy McMartin Buckey, said the prosecution’s opening volley “reminds me a little of yesterday’s mashed potatoes. There’s nothing new. . . . We’ll just have to fill in a little more detail.”

He said that while he cannot say absolutely whether any children were molested, if so, “the Buckeys weren’t involved.”

Gits faulted Rubin for focusing on the children.

“That’s not where this case begins or ends,” he said, pointing instead to the psychological techniques used to elicit disclosures of sexual abuse from youngsters who initially denied that anything had happened to them.