Videotaped Interviews in McMartin Case Hit

Thirty-three witnesses and five months into its phase of the McMartin Pre-School molestation trial, the defense has launched what one attorney termed “the most crucial aspect of our case”--an attack on videotaped interviews conducted with alleged child victims before charges were filed nearly five years ago.

Defense attorneys Tuesday concluded their questioning of clinical psychologist Michael P. Maloney, who told the jury that the controversial interviews with the children, conducted by Children’s Institute International (CII) in late l983 and early 1984 and heavily relied upon by prosecutors, used improper techniques that may have “contaminated” the youngsters’ later accounts of what occurred at the Manhattan Beach nursery school.

One 9-year-old boy, for example, “in the early parts (of his interview) states he didn’t know who Ray Buckey was” but by the end “was talking about him in a very direct fashion regarding specific (sexual) behaviors,” Maloney noted.

Molestation Charges

Buckey, 30, and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, are charged with 65 counts of molestation and conspiracy.

Maloney, testifying for the defense over the last two weeks, repeatedly criticized the interviewers at CII, a Los Angeles child abuse diagnostic and treatment center. He said they should have let the interviews progress according to the children’s spontaneous comments, but instead talked more than the youngsters and utilized a sort of script that may have resulted in false accusations.

“In a way these kids were all machined right through the same process,” Maloney testified under direct examination by defense attorney Dean Gits. “Toward the end of that process they were being asked very direct and almost coercive questions about sexual behavior. At those times, some of the children became fairly nonverbal and reverted to simply pointing and did so in a somewhat passive way and then sometimes even in a questioning way.”

The nine children who have testified against the Buckeys during the 2-year-old trial were among several hundred interviewed and physically examined at CII.

The interviews began when the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office asked a social worker there to evaluate several children. But as word of the investigation leaked and spread, parents whose children had attended the nursery school flocked to the center to have their children assessed for possible sexual abuse.

Charges Dropped

Scores of children eventually were diagnosed as having been victimized, but many parents refused to allow their children to testify and Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner ultimately dropped charges against five of the seven teachers who had been ordered to stand trial after an 18-month preliminary hearing.

Prosecutors, who began their cross-examination of Maloney late Tuesday, have admitted that the early interviews were flawed, but have defended the children’s testimony as truthful.

Maloney, the first expert witness called by the defense, testified that he was paid $35,000 to analyze the videotapes made by CII. He said he detected 17 aspects of a “script” used by all three of the center’s interviewers that, perhaps inadvertently, fed information to the children:

The interview usually began with the child drawing a person and identifying body parts, with an emphasis on sexual organs. So-called anatomically correct naked dolls were then introduced, again with a focus on their sexual parts. Class photographs were shown to the children to jog their memories and they were told that others had already described abuses. They then were given puppets to use as mouthpieces enabling them to tell “yukky secrets” to a “secret machine,” a tape recorder.

The children were also told that other children had been scared by Ray Buckey, Maloney said. He said the interviewers referred to sneaky, tricky, naked games, implied that Ray Buckey was a bad person under surveillance by police and eventually moved into specific questions about sexual acts.

Allegedly Were Led

“Those items were almost in every case that we end up with here,” Maloney said, asserting that the questioning led the children to believe that something bad must have happened at the school and that, if they were “smart,” they would tell about it too.

The psychologist, who is highly respected and frequently consulted by both prosecutors and defense attorneys in child sexual abuse cases, also said the interviews indicate that the children had already received information about the investigation from parents, brothers and sisters, and friends, putting additional pressure on them.

Attorney Gits, who represents Peggy McMartin Buckey, said outside the courtroom, that “the essential thing Dr. Maloney has established is that these children came out of CII different from what they went in,” and that the interviews served more as “a teaching, training mechanism” than as an unbiased attempt to gather information about what each child had actually experienced.

But, without giving specifics, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Pounders said outside the jury’s presence that he was “very disappointed in Maloney’s testimony.” The judge said that although the witness “has drawn out 17 supposed reasons why the system was bad,” he found them “inadequate.”

Pounders said he had even done research “as to my ability to strike this kind of testimony. That’s how bad it has been.”