McMartin Mother’s Testimony Disputes Talk of ‘Brainwash’

In testimony that contradicts defense contentions that children in the McMartin Pre-School case were “brainwashed” into believing that they had been molested, a mother who filed one of the earliest police complaints insisted that her daughter told her about nursery school “games” long before former students were interviewed by therapists.

The woman added that the day after she contacted police, she received a threatening telephone call from defendant Peggy McMartin Buckey, warning her that her child would be harassed on the stand “if we went through with this.”

“I would hate to put my daughter through what my lawyer would have to do to her if she was to be put on the witness stand,” the mother testified that Buckey told her in an emotional half-hour conversation on Sept. 13, 1983.

“She (Buckey) said she’d worked with children for 28 years and that they lie,” the woman recounted.

Buckey, 61, and her son, Ray Buckey, 29, are on trial on 100 counts of molestation and conspiracy involving 14 children who attended their family-run nursery school between 1978 and 1984.

During two days of testimony, which ended Tuesday, the mother said she learned Sept. 9, 1983, that the Manhattan Beach Police Department had sent a letter to McMartin parents asking for help in their investigation of a molestation accusation against Ray Buckey.

The mother also testified that later the same day she casually asked her 4-year-old daughter to “tell me about some of the games she played at school in Ray’s class.”

Details Kept From Jury

After a 15-minute conversation, she said, she believed that her daughter had indeed been molested. She called the police and withdrew the child from the school.

The details of the child’s revelations were withheld from the jury because the girl, now 8, is not expected to testify. However, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lael Rubin told the judge that the child told her mother that Ray Buckey had tied her up, touched her in the vaginal area, tickled her and played “horsey” with her.

The girl was interviewed by Manhattan Beach police, by physicians at UCLA (where she was also examined) and, months later, by therapists at Children’s Institute International, a child abuse diagnostic and treatment center that has been criticized for suggestive and leading methods of questioning.

She was scheduled as a witness but when she was finally called to testify at the preliminary hearing two years later her parents had changed their minds. The mother cited a variety of reasons, among them her daughter’s growing reluctance and the experiences of other child witnesses who had been kept on the stand for weeks of grueling cross-examination.

She said Peggy Buckey’s threat flashed through her mind. “It did seem to come true,” she said.

Prosecutor Rubin, successfully arguing that the witness be allowed to describe the mother-daughter conversation, told Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William R. Pounders that it is “very significant in rebutting (defense) inferences that statements were instilled by interviewers at Children’s Institute International.”

Pounders agreed, although he cautioned jurors that they should not speculate on whether or not the child was actually molested.

Preceded Publicity

“There was a conversation between mother and daughter at the conclusion of which she believed her child had been molested and she did file a police report,” he said. The chronology makes clear, he added, that the alleged “programming process was not carried out with all children involved in McMartin.”

The mother’s complaint also preceded both widespread publicity about the McMartin investigation and meetings of parents, which the defense claims spread rumors and “contaminated” the case.

Defense attorneys objected to the mother’s testimony as “hearsay,” saying the prosecution was attempting indirectly to introduce statements from the child without forcing her to take the stand.

They characterized Rubin’s direct examination of the mother as “irrelevant, time-consuming, prejudicial, and a denial of the right of confrontation and cross-examination.”

Under cross-examination, the mother acknowledged that she had been molested as a child (an uncle once fondled her), but she said that experience did not color her reaction to her daughter’s confidences.

Outside the courtroom, her testimony completed, the witness said she herself had told school director Peggy Buckey about having been molested to refute her statement that children lie about such things.

“I believed my child when she told me,” she testified earlier. And, she explained, that was partly because “it had happened to me too.”