Ran ‘Happy, Loving’ School, McMartin Defendant Asserts

McMartin Pre-School defendant Peggy McMartin Buckey testified Wednesday that she ran a “very happy, loving school,” and again denied any improprieties on her part or that of her teachers.

“My main purpose as a teacher was to help them learn to listen and follow directions,” she said, keeping her eyes glued on her attorney, Dean Gits, as he paced and questioned throughout Wednesday afternoon.

Buckey, 62, accused of 12 counts of molestation and one count of conspiracy, said she “benched” unruly youngsters and talked with them, but never used any form of corporal punishment.

In her second day of testimony, Buckey clearly was more comfortable on the witness stand. She learned forward with folded arms and was more at ease in delivering her answers, at one point volunteering to sing a children’s song for the jurors.

In response to questions addressing specific allegations raised by her former pupils, Buckey admitted she did take children off the school grounds without specific parental permission--to the corner to learn about traffic signals, to the fire and police departments, and occasionally to the bank or the grocery, even the the market where several children have alleged they were molested.

She said that classroom windows were covered with blankets or sheets during nap time--to keep the sunlight out of the sleeping children’s eyes.

Asked about ropes seized in a search of the school, she said they were used, not to tie up children, but for them to hold onto when they went on walking excursions.

Buckey also admitted she played games with the children--innocent games, like hokey-pokey, duck-duck-goose, ring around the rosey, and jumping into various-shaped forms. She said she taught them numbers, to read their names and those of their classmates, and led them in songs about animals and trains.

An Offer to Sing

“Want me to sing it?” she asked at one point in trying to explain how her class sang and played “train,” as jurors and a packed courtroom broke into laughter.

Nine of 11 alleged child victims have testified at the trial, describing being raped, sodomized, and forced to participate in oral copulation. They have told of being tied up, threatened, photographed nude, and of witnessing animal mutilation and satanic-like rituals at the school and while on “field trips.”

Buckey said she never took children to a farm, a church, or to other people’s homes. She said she took pictures of fully-clothed students which she sent home with them, and that she never saw her son--co-defendant Raymond Buckey, 30--use a camera, saying “he was never interested in photography.”

After court recessed, Gits said the purpose of his painstaking examination was to demonstrate the kind of person she is and the kind of school she ran.

“It shows the responsibility she felt as a teacher about teaching, that she had a regimen she followed to prepare youngsters for kindergarten,” Gits said.