Buckey Teaching Credential Issue Spawns Another Long Proceeding

To qualify to teach in California, Peggy Ann Buckey must first prove, among other things, that she didn’t kill a horse.

Since the 32-year-old Buckey is a former defendant in the McMartin Pre-School sexual molestation case, the unusual has become the expected in her two-year battle to be reinstated as a teacher of deaf and learning-disabled high school students.

Ordinary credentialing hearings rarely last more than a day or two. But like other aspects of the McMartin case, the Buckey hearing is well on the way to records in length and expense.

Earlier this month, Buckey’s case moved to a small hearing room in the State Office Building in Los Angeles where Administrative Law Judge Ronald Gruen is reviewing allegations by five former McMartin students that Buckey molested them at the Manhattan Beach nursery school nearly a decade ago.

In testimony so far, youngsters now 13 years old have said they were tied up, photographed in the nude, forced to play naked games, touched on their genitals and taken to churches and mortuaries to participate in satanic rituals. Various animals were slaughtered, they said, to terrorize them into not telling.

The allegations drafted for the hearings by state Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp include, for the first time, the accusation that Peggy Ann Buckey personally, and by herself, killed a horse. In the past, only her brother, Raymond Buckey, was alleged to have killed horses.

Under hearing rules, Buckey must furnish “clear and convincing evidence” that every accusation against her is untrue.

“The state believes that Miss Buckey molested these five kids,” said Stephanie Wald, the deputy attorney general representing the state Commission on Credentialing. “That makes her unqualified to teach any children ever again.”

But John Wagner, her attorney, characterized the hearing as “surreal. It’s theater of the absurd, straight out of a Kafka nightmare. The all-powerful state confronts my client with accusations that don’t make sense, and she has to prove that there is some truth and meaning here.”

After two weeks, Judge Gruen has heard from only two of the children--and at least another 150 witnesses are waiting in the wings. They include Buckey’s grandmother, Virginia McMartin, whose lawyer was served with a subpoena last week.

Reservations for Gruen’s hearing room run into September, with time off here and there for other cases. But no one is predicting with any certainty when the hearing, already dubbed the “Mini-McMartin Trial,” will end. Estimates of the government’s costs range from $3,000 to $5,000 a day, not counting expert witnesses who command up to $400 an hour.

Gruen, citing the public’s right to know, has rejected Van de Kamp’s requests to close the hearing. The room is closed, however, when children testify.

The 5-year-old, $10-million McMartin case--the longest and costliest criminal proceeding in the history of Los Angeles County--is continuing in Los Angeles Superior Court with the trial of the two remaining defendants, Buckey’s brother, Raymond, 30, and their mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 62. Raymond Buckey has been in jail since March 22, 1984.

Peggy Ann Buckey, who holds a master’s degree from USC, was a tenured teacher in the Anaheim Union High School District in early 1984 when she and six others were indicted in the McMartin case. Allegations against Buckey stemmed from a five-week period in late 1978 when she was in college and worked as a substitute teacher at her grandmother’s preschool.

After an 18-month preliminary hearing, criminal charges against Buckey and four others were dropped. But the Anaheim school district refused to take her back, contending that her moral character remained in doubt as a result of the allegations. Through its attorney, the district produced half a dozen McMartin children to repeat some of the allegations at hearings on Buckey’s credentials.

The school district has referred all inquiries to its law firm, Hill Farrer and Burrill of Los Angeles. Kyle D. Brown, the attorney handling the case, sent word through a secretary that he will not discuss the matter.

The Anaheim district, which owes Buckey $100,000 in back pay because the criminal charges were dropped, did not respond to a request for an estimate of its legal costs.

An initial hearing in Sacramento in November, 1986, produced a recommendation against giving Buckey back her credentials. She appealed to the credentialing commission, which, under a court order obtained by Buckey’s attorney, scheduled the current hearing in Los Angeles.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Wald said Buckey’s academic qualifications and her performance in the Anaheim school district, where she received excellent evaluations, were not in question. Her moral character, however, remains in doubt under civil standards, which determine guilt or innocence by the “preponderance of evidence,” Wald said. In criminal law, guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Wald explained that the burden of disproving the McMartin allegations is on Buckey since her credentials, which the state had suspended, expired during the criminal proceedings, thus making her a new applicant. If the state had tried to revoke her credentials, Wald said, the burden of proving Buckey’s “moral turpitude” would have been on the government.

On the first day of the Los Angeles hearing, Wagner charged that the state had illegally changed some of the child witnesses after the Sacramento session, and also had revised the list of allegations against his client. He told a reporter later that several of the children on both lists were not enrolled at the McMartin school when Buckey worked there. One child was not yet born.

Asked about the discrepancy, Wald said she saw no problem. “We are letting the children and their parents tell us when they were enrolled,” she said last week.