Picking Up the Pieces : A Freed Ex-McMartin Pre-School Teacher Still Haunted by Her Family’s Shattered Life

On Aug. 12, 1983, a Manhattan Beach mother told police that her 2-year-old son had been sexually abused by a teacher at the Virginia McMartin Pre-School. At the urging of authorities, other McMartin parents took their youngsters to Children’s Institute International in Los Angeles, where they were questioned about possible molestation. Social workers, using puppets to represent teachers, elicited horrifying stories from more than 350 children about sexual perversions, satanic rituals and the slaughter of animals--stories that made headlines across the nation.

In March, 1984, Raymond Buckey and six female teachers--including three members of his family--were arrested and later charged with 207 felony counts of child sexual abuse. After an 18-month preliminary hearing, however, then-Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner dropped the charges against all but two defendants: Buckey, now 30, and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 61. Their trial is currently in its second year in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Today, 2 1/2 years later, the five women who were freed remain mainly in hiding, their home addresses known only to trusted friends. Their reluctance to talk about the personal impact of the notoriety was overcome only after extensive contacts with attorneys and other intermediaries.

The 6-year-old boy still fears strangers at the door. They hold a special meaning for him, says his grandmother: He’s afraid they have come to take him away again.

“They,” in the boy’s mind, Babs Spitler explains, are the social workers who whisked him out of his home four years ago and kept him in protective custody at a series of foster homes for more than two years.

“He gets really upset when salesmen or other people he doesn’t know come to the door,” Spitler said. “We’re working on the problem, but we have a long way to go.”

Spitler, 40, the only one of the freed former McMartin teachers who still has school-age children, insisted that the location of the family’s home not be disclosed. An initial contact with a reporter was arranged at a bus station outside Los Angeles County.

“We may seem a little paranoid,” said her husband, Don, 48. “But I could never forgive myself if something happened because we got too complacent.”

Babs Spitler said few people in the community they now live in know of her involvement in the 5-year-old case.

“We want to keep it that way,” she said. “We lost two years with our kids and that can’t be made up, but now we want to be left alone so we can put our lives back together.

TV News Truck in Neighborhood

On the day of the arrests, Don Spitler recalled, he came home from a dentist’s appointment and saw a TV news truck cruising through his neighborhood in Manhattan Beach, where the family had lived for 13 years.

When he learned from friends that his wife had been arrested, he recalled: “I started running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to figure out what I should do.”

Two days later, he had raised $125,000 and was able to bail his wife out of Sybil Brand Institute, the county facility for women.

The couple immediately began looking for ways to hide their children from authorities.

They left their grandson, who was then 2 years old and whom they were in the process of officially adopting, in the care of a neighbor. He was discovered there by social workers four days later and taken away.

The Spitlers took their two children, a boy, 8, and a girl, 13, out of their schools in Manhattan Beach and sent them to relatives in San Diego County. The children were enrolled in a school there under assumed names.

Family Didn’t Go Back

The Spitlers never returned to their home. Neighbors looked after the house and the family pets.

Three weeks after her arrest, Babs Spitler’s bail was revoked by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ronald George, and she was returned to Sybil Brand, along with four other defendants.

A week later, a social worker and a Manhattan Beach police detective showed up at the San Diego school and took custody of the Spitler children.

“My son kept asking why he was being arrested,” Babs Spitler recalled. “I was in jail going out of my mind, and when Don came to visit, I couldn’t even touch him. We just sat there looking at each other through a plate glass.

“I told him to divorce me so he could keep custody of the children. But they (a Dependency Court) said he wasn’t fit to be a parent either, because he should have known what a bad person I am, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

The Spitlers, who have been married for 23 years, learned later that their children were driven from the San Diego school to Children’s Institute International, a private Los Angeles agency where hundreds of McMartin preschoolers disclosed sexual abuse under questioning by social workers.

Babs Spitler said her children were interviewed there for more than six hours and were then sent to MacLaren Hall, the county’s facility for wayward and neglected juveniles.

Four days later, Babs Spitler said, she was taken from Sybil Brand and brought to a Dependency Court hearing in handcuffs. Her older children and her husband were waiting in the room.

“I would have given anything to hug and be hugged,” she said. “But the officers told me I couldn’t show any emotion or even look at my family.”

Two weeks after the hearing, a Juvenile Court judge formally awarded custody of the two Spitler children to the San Diego County relatives who had first taken them in.

Babs Spitler said she eventually learned from her children that they secretly felt guilty for months after the interviews, fearing that they might have said something that would get her or other McMartin teachers in more trouble.

After Spitler was released and again re-arrested, she was finally freed in mid-June of 1984 on a higher bail--$400,000 posted by friends, family, her husband and even her attorney. She and her husband were allowed to visit their children for two hours a week or on weekends in the presence of a court-appointed monitor.

“The county charged me $4,100 for such services (mainly foster care for his children), even after Babs was cleared,” Don Spitler said. “I’m still paying it off--$100 a month.”

In March, 1986, two months after charges against her were dropped and after both Spitlers had submitted to extensive psychological testing, their two children were returned. Their grandson, whom they have since legally adopted, was returned that June.

“For days and days, all I wanted to do was just look at my kids and talk to them and hug them,” Babs Spitler recalled. “There was such a close feeling. . . .

“We’ve worked as a family to get through everything and put our lives back together again, a piece at a time.”

Babs Spitler said she stays home now “just being a housewife and trying to forget what happened.”

‘I Wanted a Trial’

But anger and fears keep rising from the past. “I wanted a trial,” she said. “When they dropped the charges, they said they didn’t have enough evidence to convict me. They never said that Babs Spitler is innocent.”

Spitler worked on and off at the McMartin preschool from 1973 until it closed in January, 1984. One of the ironies of her case, she said, is that in the ‘70s she helped establish the Richstone Center, a Hawthorne-based agency that counsels abused children and their parents.

Don Spitler, a Los Angeles County lifeguard, said his salary is barely adequate for a family of five. He said the couple’s Manhattan Beach home, valued at $200,000, along with another property worth $50,000 and their savings “soon went up in smoke” when he started getting the bills for his wife’s defense.

“We have to really watch our expenses now,” Babs Spitler said.

Death Threats Made

Her husband said death threats have been made against his wife and other ex-defendants. His wife said the stigma of child-abuse allegations also still haunts the family.

“The D.A. said the charges ‘probably’ weren’t true,” she added. “But when you’re accused of molesting children, ‘probably’ doesn’t really cancel out what was said about you, or give you back what you lost.”

Don Spitler still finds it difficult to express the feelings he had when he learned that the woman he was married to had been charged with sexually molesting toddlers.

“Anger, of course,” he said. “I mean, real anger. I walked a lot on the beach trying to deal with that. But what you’re left with is a feeling of helplessness, knowing that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing you can do.”

The Spitlers were silent for a minute. Then Babs Spitler reached over and touched her husband’s arm. “He’s been my rock, my shelter and fortress,” she said.