McMartin Prosecution Begins Final Arguments

Promising jurors straight talk and no folksy tales like they heard from the defense, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lael Rubin began the final three-day stretch of the marathon McMartin Pre-School molestation trial Friday by attacking defense “misstatements” and “tricks.”

Rubin said the defense tried to stifle the truth by threatening and intimidating the alleged victims and their parents during cross-examination.

“Don’t be fooled,” she scrawled on a large blackboard as she began her brisk closing arguments. She said that over the next few days she will intersperse her comments on the evidence and the prosecution’s theory of the case “with what I feel to be some of the more outrageous and egregious misstatements of the evidence made to you by the defense.”

“The horror among horrors in this case,” she said, “is that these children were molested . . . and they have been attacked all over again in this courtroom right in front of your eyes. Are we going to let people who molest kids get away with it? I hope not.”

Conceding that parts of the children’s accounts of rape, sodomy, oral copulation, naked games, bizarre field trips, animal mutilation, pornographic photo sessions and satanic rituals are hard to believe, she said the prosecution is convinced that Raymond Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, molested youngsters at their family-run nursery school. She noted that not one child has recanted.

The Buckeys are charged with 65 counts of molestation and conspiracy involving 11 children, and face life behind bars if convicted on all counts. The case will go to the jury next week, after a 2 1/2-year trial in which 124 witnesses testified.

Saying she would try to anticipate the questions jurors might ask if they were they able to sit down together for an informal dialogue, Rubin addressed the defense contention that if large numbers of children were molested at the school over several years, certainly one of them would have talked.

“Many of these kids tried to talk in their own way,” she said, “and nobody listened.”

Some told their parents about sexual games, others behaved abnormally. Some complained of genital and anal pain, others begged not to go to school.

But as one sobbing mother testified: “It never crossed my mind that my child was being molested. Never, ever, then. . . .”

After the investigation became public and parents began questioning their children about activities at the nursery school, one boy said “Nothing happened and I don’t want to talk about it,” Rubin reminded the jury.

However, it was only after being interviewed on videotape and medically examined at Children’s Institute International, a Los Angeles child-abuse diagnostic and treatment center, that many of the alleged victims were able to describe what they had experienced and to supply the details that became the foundation of the prosecution’s case.

The defense contends that children were programmed by ambitious therapists and prosecutors to believe they had been molested, and that their parents were duped.