Shadow of Doubt : A Small Child Says a Man Molested Her. And So Begins the Search for an Elusive Truth.

Although the events in this story are factual, all names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the families involved.

LAST SUMMER, RETURNING home late one evening, I found a puzzling message on my telephone answering machine from a woman whom I will call Julie Johnson. I’d like to talk to you, the voice said.

Through a distant family connection, I’d known Julie intermittently for a long time, although not very well. Our paths sometimes crossed for a while in the late 1970s, but I’d had no contact with her at all in the past 10 years. I understood she’d married and now had two children, but I knew nothing of her husband. I couldn’t imagine why she was calling me.

“There’s something we need to talk to you about. Could you come over?” she asked when I returned the call. She spoke haltingly, almost whispering.

OK, I said, but could you tell me what this is about?

Julie hesitated. “Something bad has happened,” she said. “The past three weeks have been a nightmare.” Now she could barely speak. “We’ve been accused of a child molestation.”

More than a month elapsed before I was able to speak at length with Julie and her husband, whom I will call David Johnson. With them at their kitchen table were their children, a 3 1/2-year-old son and a 16-month-old daughter, whom I will call Adam and Jennifer. By then, they’d learned the case against them had been dropped. A little girl, one of Adam’s playmates, had made accusations against David, but there’d been no charges filed, no prosecution. The Johnsons were more stunned than happy, though--their manner suggested survivors after an accident. They wanted to tell me their story. They wanted me to write about their experiences, as long as I didn’t identify them.

Why? I asked. What’s the point now? Why not let it die?

“Because I think a lot of people can be hurt and are being hurt continuously through the incompetence and lack of training of people involved all through this situation,” David said.

“Because we need to vent this,” said Julie. “We can’t sue anyone, we can’t do anything after this horrible nightmare. We want to send a warning that it could happen to anybody. After seeing the impact on an innocent family, maybe other families who hear something from their kids will think twice before making a report. . . . We want this story told.”

Of course, I understood there’d be more than one story to tell. I’d reported on child abuse before, and so knew well the tragic consequences that can follow when a community fails to respond to warning signs. For a book I’m writing, I’d studied how such failures in the past 20 years had spurred all manner of statutes and lawsuits and public opinion that now empower and compel everyone to act decisively. Whatever had happened to the Johnsons, I expected there were understandable reasons.

All the same, over the past half-dozen years, I’d increasingly heard people say the pendulum had now swung too far in the other direction, that overreaction had supplanted under-reaction. In a meeting room in a small Minnesota town, I’d sat in a circle with a dozen couples accused of child molestation, all insisting they’d been wronged, all with a pile of legal documents before them, all imploring me to investigate their cases. Another day, I’d listened as a former director of the National Center on Child Abuse explained how he’d seen the situation change in a handful of years from people ignoring even the most grievous cases to people phoning in with what he called “a lot of junk,” much of it related to divorce and custody fights. I’d heard lawyers say that authorities, in their well-intentioned drive to stop child abuse, were trampling the rights of parents and entangling innocent people in torturous investigations.

In these exchanges, the respective voices always sounded so certain--either we’d gone way too far or not nearly far enough in addressing child abuse. Where was the truth? The Johnsons’ situation roused my curiosity. If my various connections to the topic created conflicts, they also provided a sense of context.

OK, I told the Johnsons. But I’ll need to hear from other people involved in this case, people who might have viewpoints different from yours.

“That’s fine,” Julie replied. “We want you to do that. We’ve sat here in a nightmare for three weeks, hearing nothing, being told nothing, wondering what was in their minds. We want to know what was in their minds.”

They offered names and phone numbers of everyone they’d encountered during their experience--caseworkers, detectives, prosecutors, neighbors, clergymen, educators, the little girl’s parents. They gave me the private journal they’d started keeping on the day the police and the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services caseworker had arrived at their door. They signed a release saying anyone could speak about them and provide me reports and files.

In this fashion, I began hearing in detail about how a community and a government system responded to one report of child molestation, and, by extension, to all such reports. In time, I learned a good deal. More people than I expected were willing to talk as long as I didn’t identify them by name, and their recollections of events did not differ greatly. All the same, I ended up anything but enlightened.

Although some people were certain the Johnsons had been wrongly accused, I gradually came to realize others thought them guilty, even though they never were charged. This unsettled me--ambiguity is intriguing, but in this case clarity seemed much more desirable. For a time, I tried to puzzle out the question for myself, until I realized doing so was impossible.

Only this much seemed certain: A little girl was molested. The molestation was reported to authorities. A system responded. As a result, a family was investigated and maligned and ostracized but never charged or cleared, while a child molester--whether Johnson or someone else--went unstopped and unpunished. No resolution was ever reached.

“The problem is this,” explained the police detective who investigated the Johnsons. “Once the accusation is made, there is no way to prove guilt and no way to prove innocence.”

BY ALL ACCOUNTS,the investigation of the Johnsons began when the little girl’s mother--like David Johnson, an educated professional--noticed her child was acting oddly. When she questioned her, the girl, 3 1/2, talked of being molested. She described the abuse in detail and identified her playmate Adam’s daddy as the molester.

I cannot report precisely how the identification was made--whether, for example, the little girl volunteered the name or was offered a choice--partly because the little girl’s parents were among the few who would not speak with me. The question is not at all a minor one, of course. Was the little girl led by her questioners, was she directed away from identifying someone else, was she unable to name someone closer to her? Or did she speak without guidance? These are the sorts of issues that would be examined for days in a courtroom, and have been--in cases ranging from the protracted McMartin Preschool prosecution in Southern California to the ill-fated proceedings in Jordan, Minn., where charges against 23 families eventually were dropped long after their children had been removed from their homes.

I can report only that the mother took her daughter to a medical center, where a physical exam yielded evidence of molestation. Even this much might be contested, though: A deputy district attorney later explained to me that a defense lawyer in such cases might argue that the bruised labia were the result of other causes.

Ten years ago, the matter most likely would have stopped at the hospital, but now the process was just beginning. The medical center called the police, as required under state law. The police cross-reported to the Department of Children’s Services. Because the DCS was contacted on a Saturday, the report went to a DCS emergency command post, an after-hours response desk created three years ago. The details of this case, a DCS supervisor decided, fit the category that required immediate action. The command post contacted a caseworker, whom I will call Sam Rowan, and read him the report.

Rowan, in his early 40s, had been a DCS caseworker for four years. He’d brought to the job a master’s degree in family and marriage counseling, and the DCS had added three weeks of training before sending him into the field.

Rowan’s first task now was to assess the safety and credibility of the little girl. He visited her family, questioning both the parents and the young victim. He found the experience difficult. The mother was crying, the father appeared to be in shock.

Rowan considered: Is it a functional family or not? What are the patterns of behavior? What are the intelligence and verbal skills of the child? Does her statement have details and logic? Is it specific or vague? Is this age-appropriate information she’s providing? Is this family screwed up?

Making such judgments is difficult, and the pressures are considerable. Caseworkers and their departments in recent years have faced civil suits and criminal prosecutions when they’ve failed to identify abuse or protect a child. In an effort to eliminate mistakes and precisely control responses, lawmakers and administrators have tried to quantify and standardize the decision-making process. Caseworkers like Rowan now carry with them multiple-page charts and questionnaires aimed at defining what constitutes abuse and high-risk conditions.

Despite such attempts to codify good judgment, human beings still have to make decisions. Rowan finds judging the credibility of small children in molestation cases the toughest of all. A nightmare, he calls the experience.

“Sexual molestation cases are very, very difficult,” Rowan told me when we met for dinner one night. “My job is to believe the allegation unless proved otherwise. . . . I am biased. My job is to be the advocate for the children. . . . I have to justify every act I take. There are checkpoints, laws, regulations, guidelines. If I make a bad judgment, it comes back to haunt me. I face lawsuits all the time. This thought is constantly on my mind. I’m a good worker. I carefully document what and why I do, every step of the way. I’d rather err on the side of the children. There are checkpoints and oversights beyond me. I can be overturned and reversed.”

To Rowan, the statement of the little girl who accused the Johnsons was detailed and consistent; he heard some of it directly from her, a good deal more as relayed by the mother. It contained descriptions Rowan felt no 3-year-old could imagine or fantasize, but was told in the language of a little child--”peepee,” for example, not penis--and Rowan thought this particularly telling. He saw no apparent troubles in her own home. Rowan decided she was credible.

He steeled himself, for now he had to visit the perpetrator. That’s what he called David Johnson--”the perpetrator.” Johnson had two children of his own, and these kids might be in danger, too. A “companion case,” the DCS labels it, when the accused has access to other children.

“Visiting the perpetrator is a very nasty, difficult business,” Rowan said. “You go to the police station, get a unit to go with you. We drive over in two cars. Once there, I ask the cops, how do you want to do this? Eighty percent of the time, they say, you’re the expert, you handle it. It’s hard to believe that in two years of doing this, only one family has said no when I appeared at their door. Most are so shocked, they let me in. We go into the home, we explain the allegations.”

THAT SUNDAY WAS such a non-day, the Johnsons would say later. There’s little else to remember about it.

They’d spent the afternoon by the pool at David’s sister’s home. Adam and Jennifer played with their six cousins, and the grandparents took all the kids to McDonald’s for lunch. The Johnsons returned to their own home around 4 p.m. They ate dinner with their children, maybe a pizza but they weren’t sure. They sat in the den, watching the news on television. The kids were tired and cranky, and so were they.

It was shortly before 7 p.m., midway through a long holiday weekend. The Johnsons were trying to think through chores they needed to do later that night in preparation for a barbecue they were hosting the next afternoon for 16 people. A tuna dip still needed to be made, and a Jell-O mold.

Julie lay stretched on the couch, Jennifer on top of her, clutching a blanket. David sat in the big corner chair with Adam. Because his position gave him a clear view through the window by the front door, David was the one who first noticed the police car cruise slowly by. He walked to the window. Police cars were an uncommon sight on their secluded residential street. By the time he reached the glass, the road was empty.

Two minutes later, David saw two uniformed policemen walking up his driveway, accompanied by a man dressed in slacks and a short-sleeve cotton shirt. They rang the bell.

“I’m with the Department of Children’s Services,” the man in the cotton shirt said when David opened the door. “There have been accusations of child abuse in your home. . . . Can we come in and talk about this?”

Julie was standing in the front hallway, Jennifer in her arms and Adam at her side. The policemen, she said later, looked so big to her.

David took Sam Rowan outside to the back yard to talk out of earshot of his family, but their golden retriever started barking so crazily that Rowan finally asked if they could go back inside. They ended up at the dining room table.

Rowan began reading the allegations from a sheet of paper. David, he said, has been accused of sexually molesting a little girl, a playmate of his son, while she was visiting their home. The little girl said Adam’s daddy placed items in her vagina while he masturbated into a bottle. The little girl said this happened in Adam’s room. The little girl said Adam was there with them.

David stared across the table as Rowan recited the precise charges. David was in his mid-30s, a professional who’d done well enough to own a house in the hills with a view. Out his back window, mountains rose against a moonlit sky. In his kitchen, photos of his family and their friends covered the refrigerator, stuck there with magnetic smiling faces.

“Julie,” David called to his wife. “Julie, you’re not going to believe this.”

Johnson is an assertive man accustomed to controlling his world. His only experience with the police until Rowan’s arrival involved speeding tickets. Once, years before, when he was working as a lifeguard, he’d given a cop lip while being written up for having his motorcycle on the sidewalk. The cop had thrown him in the back seat of his patrol car and slammed the door on his legs, and David had almost lunged at the guy. That was the closest he’d ever come to serious trouble. Now, listening to Rowan, David did not feel in control. He began to defend himself, to deny the allegations, to reclaim his territory.

“Could I speak alone to your son?” Rowan finally asked.

“Fine,” David said. “Ask him anything you want.”

Julie was uncomfortable watching the caseworker lead Adam into the den and close the door, but she didn’t know what to say. She felt this man could do anything he wanted in her house just then.

While they waited, one of the officers turned to the Johnsons. “You know, I got accused of this by our pediatrician once,” he said. The second officer added another comment: “We’ve been in houses where by now we’ve already taken the kids out.”

Only then did David and Julie realize the DCS worker might be there to take their own children from them.

Everyone stared at the closed den door. Jennifer started crying and whining. Julie tried to put her in a highchair, give her something to eat, but that didn’t help. Please not now, Julie told her. The last thing she wanted was these people to see her child uncomfortable.

When Rowan and Adam finally emerged from the den, Adam rushed to his room and came out in a second with an inflatable dinosaur to show the visitor. The DCS caseworker approached the Johnsons.

“At this point,” he said, “I don’t see there is a threat to your kids. We’re just collecting information. We’ll be in touch.”

The Johnsons thought Rowan looked more relaxed now, less on edge, less certain David was the guilty party.

“We thought it was over,” Julie said.

They were wrong.

ADAM HAD TOLD ROWAN NOTHING at all that sounded suspicious. But the little girl’s detailed description was, to Rowan, conclusive. He absolutely thought Johnson was guilty. He discounted Adam’s denials.

“Interviewing a kid that age in their own home is very difficult,” Rowan told me. “It usually produces negative results. The prosecutor won’t let me use anatomical dolls. It’s their house. I have only a few minutes. All I can do is try, and write it up. I ask, ‘Did you ever play with Daddy without clothes on?’ But they’re scared and don’t understand why I’m there. In that setting, I’m not likely to get anything. . . . If I leave, it’s not always because I think they’re innocent. It’s because I have no statement or evidence.”

THE JOHNSONS’ visitors had been in their house just 20 minutes. It was now 7:20 p.m. David and Julie settled at their kitchen table with a cordless telephone.

“They walk out and we’re just sitting here shocked,” David said. “Absolutely shocked, not knowing who to call, what to do. The first phone call I made to anybody was to our minister.”

The clergyman was more than their spiritual leader; he was their connection to the little girl’s family. Adam and the little girl were in the same class at the church preschool. The parents knew each other, had visited each other’s homes but only while picking up their children. The little girl had played at the Johnson home some half-dozen afternoons.

When the minister didn’t answer, David left a message on his answering machine. Then he called his best friend. You’re not going to believe this, he began. Can you recommend a lawyer?

“Between these phone conversations,” Julie said, “we’re thinking this has got to turn around because we’re the people we are. We’re innocent, we’re good people, things like this don’t happen to people like us.”

While David was talking to his friend for a second time at about 9:30, the operator interrupted with an emergency call from Sam Rowan.

“New evidence has been brought to our attention,” the DCS worker said. “Evidence that you may possibly be a threat to your children. I can’t tell you the evidence. But we feel there is a threat in your household to your children, and we’re required to remove your children from your house.”

“No!” David was shouting. “You’re not taking my kids out of this house. You cannot do this.”

Rowan was taken aback by what he considered Johnson’s bombastic manner. “If you don’t quiet down, we’ll take your children out of your house,” the caseworker responded. “We do have alternatives, though. If you will calm down, we will tell you what the alternatives are.”

The kids could remain if David left the house immediately, went to a motel, Rowan said. Or if a third party, a responsible relative, came over to stay with them.

The Johnsons demanded to speak to Rowan’s supervisor.

“Do you have any children?” Julie asked this woman when she came to the phone.

“What’s that have to do with it?” she replied.

“It has a lot to do with it,” Julie said. “You have no idea what this means to us. We’re innocent people and you’re telling us you have to take our children. Who are you? Who’s going to protect our children from you?”

“It’s the law,” the supervisor told them. “No matter who you are, or how innocent you are, if there has been an accusation, this is what we have to do.”

The Johnsons agreed to get David’s father over to the house immediately. While waiting for him to arrive, the phone rang again. It was the minister, returning their call.

I’ve been accused of this molestation, David began.

Yes, I know, the clergyman said.

David later offered his recollection of their conversation:

“The next thing the minister said was, ‘Before you say anything else, I want you to know that I am waiving clergy privilege.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Well, the seriousness of the matter is so much . . . that if anybody asks me a question about it, I have to tell them what I know.’ And at that point, he really caught us between the eyes. I said, ‘What? You’re assuming we’re guilty.’ He said: ‘Oh, no, no, it has nothing to do with guilt, I am not assuming you’re guilty, but whatever you say, if somebody asks me, I’ll have to tell them.’ I said, ‘What are you telling me? . . . Can you tell me what you know?’ ‘I can’t tell you,’ he answered. I said, ‘Well, can you talk to (the little girl’s parents) and find out what they know and what they think, and tell me?’ ‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said.”

Julie continued their account:

“And I said, ‘This is a nightmare.’ And the minister said: ‘Yes. You’re right. That’s exactly what it is.’ And I said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And he said, his one spiritual advice to me, was: ‘Life is long.’ ”

The phone rang yet again minutes later, just as David’s father was walking through the Johnsons’ front door.

“You have to take your kids down to the hospital for a scan team exam,” Sam Rowan said. “Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. It’s the law. Children of the accused must be examined for sexual abuse.”

David and Julie sat in their darkened living room talking until 2 a.m., then went to bed but could not sleep.

“We tossed and turned,” Julie said. “And I think we went to look at the children.”

IF I CALL BACK LATER,” Rowan told me, offering a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical question, “it’s perhaps because I’ve spoken to someone . . . who has suggested something that gives me further motive to remove the kids.”

What new evidence had come up in this case? I asked, this time more directly.

“I think I just re-evaluated the case later that Sunday night. . . . In retrospect, leaving two kids with a grandparent there is not that effective.”

WHEN THE JOHNSONS, their two children and David’s father arrived at the hospital emergency room at precisely 9 the next morning, they found Rowan waiting. David thought he was acting a little more empathetic now.

“You won’t be charged for the examination,” Rowan said.

David asked that Rowan repeat the allegations to his father. “You tell him what you told me last night,” he said.

As the three men retreated to a private room, Julie held both children on her lap while a nurse took their temperature and vital statistics.

“Is this going to hurt?” Julie asked. “On a scale of one to 10, how painful is this going to be for these children?”

It’s not going to be bad, the nurse replied. They’ll just take a few cultures. Mainly they talk with the social worker.

Julie had been imagining two hours of poking and probing. Relieved, she started to cry but held back because Adam was sitting on her lap.

Time passed--half an hour, then an hour, then two. No one came for the children. Down the hall, the Johnsons could see Rowan and hospital personnel sitting in a room with glass windows. David thought they were looking at them, trying to decide whether they were molesters.

As it happens, the people in the glass-windowed room were arguing. The doctor in charge of the emergency room didn’t want to do the exams.

“I wasn’t trying to not cooperate,” she told me later. “I was trying to make sure this was the right thing, not just something convenient for the social worker or us. It seemed to me like they were going from A to D, instead of A to B. I was not convinced enough history had been taken, enough interviews with this family and kids. I started asking, have the children admitted anything happened, disclosed anything? No, they said. I asked, are you convinced there is something? They said they didn’t have enough time to make that determination. So it was my judgment. It seemed to me these children were safe. The interviewing process had not occurred. I wasn’t so sure what sort of message we’d be giving to the kids. What we do in a physical exam is very close to what is done in the supposed molestation. What we do is very much close to rape. We can’t judge guilt or innocence. But there were missing pieces of information. People were trying to hurry things along.”

The emergency-room doctor remembered this case particularly well because she had felt threatened.

“The DCS guy (Rowan) was saying, ‘If anything happens to these children, it’s your responsibility, you’re taking the responsibility.’. . . I finally said, ‘OK, I will take the responsibility.’ There are complexities here, folks. We need to view every situation separately. You can’t develop a routine for every case. It’s easy to just do everything that protects. It’s much harder to be sensitive, to make judgments. For the moment, I felt intimidated by the system, but I resisted. I’ve done it before, I do it all the time, but each time you put yourself on the line.”

At 11:30 a.m., Rowan and a social worker emerged from the room. “I have good news for you,” the social worker told the Johnsons. “Your kids won’t have to be examined today because the scan team’s not here.”

David erupted. He pointed his finger at Rowan. He hollered: “We came down here today specifically to get this over with. You’re not giving me good news. You brought us down here for nothing? You people are no longer going to be coming into our lives. You will not disrupt our children again. You talk to us through an attorney.”

After Julie quieted David down, he walked off. “I realized I was getting completely out of control,” he said. “I’m going to hit the guy if I stayed much longer.”

The social worker turned to Julie. “This is not good that your husband is showing such aggressive behavior,” she said. “This is going to impact negatively. You’d better control your husband.”

LATER THAT WEEK, Sam Rowan asked his supervisor to remove him from the Johnson case. He also decided he no longer wanted to work for the emergency response command post.

“This case was going to be horrific,” he explained to me later. “I saw that anyone touching this case was going to get burned. It was much more emotional than most cases. Mainly because of the behavior of the perpetrator. I was threatened with lawsuits. Then the emergency-room doctor. . . . And the mother crying. Seeing the victim. Going out to the perpetrator’s house with the cops. All the pieces were there. I don’t always have all the pieces. This time I saw it all. The nastiness of the allegations. I hated reading the allegations to the couple. . . . The only thing I can liken this work to is when I was an Air Force intelligence briefer in Korea. I was pointing out routes and danger spots for pilots. Lives depended on me spotting the dangers.”

MONDAY EVENING, after their hospital visit and after their barbecue for 16 guests, the Johnsons received a phone call at 7 p.m. It was their minister.

They’d been friends. Their children attended school together. The Johnsons had been considering inviting the clergyman and his wife for dinner. But the conversation now was strained.

According to the Johnsons, the minister said he did not think it would be a good idea for David or Julie to bring Adam to preschool the next morning. Was there a third person they could get to bring Adam to school?

Julie later offered her recollection of what followed:

“I said, ‘No, there’s not a third person that can take Adam to school.’ I’m thinking, why shouldn’t I bring him to school? I don’t want anybody else to bring him to school. Then he said: ‘OK, OK. Why don’t you keep him home tomorrow and do something really fun. Go take him to Disneyland. Do something really fun with (Adam).’ I said: ‘OK, I’ll keep him home tomorrow, I’ll bring him to school Wednesday.’ ”

Although authorities had never told the Johnsons precisely what day the molestation was said to have occurred, Julie later that night suddenly recalled when the little girl last had played at their house. They’d had an out-of-town friend staying with them that day about three weeks ago, because one of Julie’s girlfriends was getting married. David had come home late that afternoon from work and had settled in the den to visit with the friend. Julie was sure the little girl’s father had arrived half an hour later to pick her up. Julie was sure David had never been alone with the children.

THE NEXT MORNING, the minister called again. According to the Johnsons, he’d changed his mind--Julie could bring Adam to school the next day. But Adam should be in another classroom for the rest of the year. Since the little girl had been through such trauma and associates Adam with it, he should be the one to move.

The minister called once more late that night, just before midnight, waking the Johnsons. Adam definitely was going to be moved to another classroom, he said. They’d met with a psychologist, the little girl’s psychologist. She advised doing this.

That’s not acceptable, the Johnsons said. What are you going to tell parents when they ask why Adam’s not in the class? What are we going to tell Adam?

“David was just screaming on the phone,” Julie recalled. “We were yelling and screaming.”

They discussed a compromise. Maybe Adam would go to the connected classroom next door, since he spends half the day there anyway.

The next morning at 8:30, Julie drove Adam to school. The school director was standing at the door of Adam’s regular classroom, pointing the little boy not to the connecting classroom but to another one at the far end of the hallway, one full of younger children. Adam objected and asked why.

“What are you going to tell Adam?” Julie asked the school director. Then she looked at her son, who was starting to whine.

“Adam, you don’t look like you’re feeling really good,” Julie said. “Let’s go home.”

Back in her house, Julie called the church to say she was withdrawing Adam from school and the family from the congregation. Then she took both Adam and Jennifer to their family pediatrician, who examined them and agreed to verify that they showed no signs of molestation. Then she took Adam to the La Brea Tar Pits, his favorite place of all.

AT 10 THAT SAME morning, a Los Angeles police detective, whom I will call Sullivan, visited David at his place of business. David had called him the day before, urging the meeting; he’d gotten his name from the officers Sunday night. The detective and Johnson sat on a bus bench on the sidewalk outside David’s office.

“I am asking you to investigate me,” David said. “Do whatever it takes to find out whatever information you need. I have nothing to hide. . . . What can I do to prove that I’m innocent? I will stand in front of a lineup, you can have my picture. I’ll take a lie detector test. Our pediatrician will tell you what kind of parents we’ve been. What can I do?”

Sullivan listened, his expression blank.

“Do you know of any reason why this family would implicate you?” he asked.

No, David did not. He offered instead the name and phone number of the out-of-town friend who’d been staying with them the afternoon the little girl last visited.

Well, maybe we’ll get that later, the detective said.

The officer had new information for David: The little girl had implicated Julie in her statement, too. She said Adam’s mommy had walked in and seen them and gotten angry. She said Adam’s mommy had told her she better not tell anybody, because no one would believe her and she’d get in trouble.

David repeated his offer to take a lie detector test.

We don’t put much credence in those, the detective explained. And we can’t use them in court.

“There is nothing you can do,” the officer added just before leaving. “Don’t expect this to blow over. This can drag on for the statute of limitations, six years. I’ve seen cases that have gone that long.”

It was after this encounter that David first began thinking his family might lose everything they had. His profession, as it happened, made him dependent on people in the community coming to him out of trust and paying for his services. He started considering the necessity of selling his home and moving away.

The next day, David wrote in his log:

“In my 45-min. discussion with the detective yesterday , I told him my strength and ability as a fixer. I fix broken cars, toys, office equipment. . . . How do I fix this! A broken reputation, a damaged position in the community. He didn’t have an answer. . . . I’m roaming around the twilight zone with no way to switch the channel. . . . I have absolutely no explanation for how or why I have been implicated. . . . How has this happened? I don’t have an answer.”

THE DETECTIVE WHO sat on the bus bench with David was a 12-year veteran, the last six devoted full time to sexual assault cases. He’d heard plenty of stories like David’s, plenty of equally ardent denials, enough not to be greatly impressed.

“This man (David) wanted to be proven innocent,” the detective told me. “ ‘How can he prove himself innocent,’ he asks. He can’t. The only way is if he could prove he wasn’t there. . . . Child-molestation reports are the most difficult to handle. The only source is usually the victim, a small child. The judicial system is not equipped to handle this.”

In his own mind, though, there were no doubts.

“I don’t think there’s any question he did it,” the detective said. “This little girl’s story has not changed from Day One. The same person is identified all the time. Lots of people in this guy’s position can’t prove themselves innocent when accused, but only a small number are truly innocent. We can weed a lot out. This guy kept saying to me, ‘Why would I do this? I have too much to lose.’ Well, in my years, I’ve handled plenty of successful, established community leaders. Position and status mean nothing to me. I’m not impressed.”

Why, I asked, did he reject David’s offer to take a polygraph examination?

“It wouldn’t stop our investigation if he tested truthful. Some people can pass even if they’re lying. And this guy was not going to confess if we got negative results, so what was the point? I made that judgment.”

Why, I asked, wasn’t he interested in the Johnsons’ out-of-town guest? That was a question much on my mind just then, for I’d placed a long-distance call to this visitor that very morning, before driving to the police station.

She remembered the day clearly, she told me. She and her husband were in town for their friend’s wedding. She remembered the little girl visiting the Johnsons that day. She’d talked to Adam and his playmate about school and thought the little girl really cute.

“Then (Julie) sent them to play in (Adam’s) room, and started frying fish for the kids. (Julie) and I were going out to a bachelorette party that night with our girlfriend who was getting married. I’m trying to decide what to wear for the wedding. Then (David) came home, around 5-ish, somewhere around that time. (David) went into the den. I remember having to walk around him for the next hour, because all our luggage, six bags, were there in the den. (David) was half asleep, talking to me, watching the TV news. I was in and out, dressing in the bathroom just off the hallway right next to (Adam’s) room. When you step out of the bathroom, (Adam’s) room is right there. The door was always open. The kids were both sitting on the floor playing with stuff. I was going back and forth into the den. (David) was stretched out in there. I had to crawl around him to get to the phone at one point, then to get to my luggage. Then the little girl’s daddy drove up, I remember his car, even the color. I could see it on the driveway. I told (the little girl), ‘Your daddy’s here.’ She came out from the bedroom. (David) was still sitting with me in the den. It was now around 5:45, 6 p.m. The little girl left with her dad. Fifteen minutes later, (Julie) and I left.. . . . All I know is what I saw that day. There is nothing that could have happened that day. No way on earth he could have done it the day I was there. Just wasn’t a chance. Absolutely no way.”

Have you told anyone else this story? I asked.

“No one has called me,” she said. “I was expecting a call. I was very disappointed that no one called me. It really amazes me that no one has asked me what happened.”

The woman’s recollection was precise, but which day the little girl said she was molested remained an unresolved issue. This was a problem common with abuse cases involving small children, who often can’t pinpoint exact dates.

The detective shrugged when I asked about this visitor and recounted my conversation with her. “It’s their friend,” he said. “And this little girl never said exactly which day the molestation happened.”

OTHER mothers, noticing that Adam no longer was in school, soon started asking questions, and Julie tried to deflect them, but then one woman ventured to ask a teacher at the school what had happened. The teacher shook her head. “I can’t say, but it’s unbelievable,” she answered.

Julie exploded when she heard about this comment--”now we knew it was going through the grapevine”--and demanded of the church that such talk stop. Soon after, the Johnsons decided they’d better tell their friends before they heard it from others. On Friday afternoon, five days after the DCS first appeared at their door, Julie and her good friend, a woman I will call Diane, took their children bumper-bowling. When they returned to the Johnson house, David appeared at the door and asked Diane to come inside. The two of them walked into the back yard alone. Diane’s little daughter was Adam’s best friend.

“Diane, I’ve got to tell you something,” he began.

The next day, David wrote in his log:

“My discussion with (Diane) unloaded quite a bit of dread about friends knowing our situation. She responded as I would have hoped, but deep down I still feel pangs of suspicion. Everyone keeps asking the same question. Why us, why has this kid so arbitrarily and steadfastly picked us as her molesters?! The question itself implicates us. What on earth can be going through the minds of other people?”

IT WAS TUESDAY OF THE next week when the Johnsons learned from Diane that DCS caseworkers were contacting several of their acquaintances, parents whose children had played over at the Johnson house.

There’s been an allegation of child molesting, a DCS worker would say. Your child has played at the house of the accused person. Has your child showed any signs of abuse? Can we come over and talk to you and your child?

One mother soon realized the caseworker must be talking about the Johnsons. To another who wasn’t sure, the caseworker identified the Johnsons by name. Soon these women called Julie, frantic and perplexed. One rushed to the Johnsons’ house that night to hear the story. Julie met another in the park two days later and explained everything as they watched their children scramble through the sandbox and playground. Late one night at a dinner party with her three closest friends and their husbands, Julie and David turned down the stereo. “We have something to tell you,” Julie began. “A terrible thing has happened to us. We want to tell you because this could happen to you and we want to protect you.” Then she started crying for the first time since their experience began.

David, instead, got angry. He took to the phone, hollering at those whom he felt were maligning his good name. He called the DCS caseworker who’d contacted their acquaintances. He called the detective. He called the deputy district attorney who had his case.

In his log he wrote:

“I refuse to go down without making as much noise as possible. . . . I’ve been starting to get real bizarre and violent thoughts about DCS possibly showing up at my front door to take my kids. Hopefully, I could maintain a level of rationality, but I’m not sure. No one will take my kids, no one! . . . Every time the phone rings or a car pulls up to our house, we are on pins and needles. That is no way to live! Not when you are good people!”

He learned about the nonprofit advocacy and support organization called Victims of Child Abuse Legislation (VOCAL) and visited its representatives. He contemplated filing lawsuits, but when he consulted a lawyer, he discovered that virtually everyone in the system was immune from such litigation.

Then, on a Monday morning two weeks after the charges against him were revealed, David drove to the office of a nationally recognized private polygraph expert recommended by a VOCAL lawyer. There, he took a polygraph exam and passed.

AS IT HAPPENED, the DCS caseworker who received David’s bellicose phone call felt more conflicted than offended. I will call her Leslie Kirkland. She is a woman in her early 40s with a master’s degree in social work and has been a social worker for more than 20 years, most of them in children’s services.

“His call was part of a day,” she told me when we met. “It’s the nature of the system. I get lots of calls from upset people. I don’t blame them, but I don’t know the answer. How to protect the child and adult at the same time? I think sex abuse is a very hazardous issue. I don’t want to see anyone charged falsely. But how do you ever disprove? How do you find out the truth? You have very little evidence. Children don’t lie, but they can’t separate fantasy from reality; fantasy is part of their lives. My own daughter, seeing another child misbehaving, once turned to me and said, ‘You used to spank me when I did that.’ Well, I have never spanked her in my life. On the other hand, you want to protect children. I have to err on the side of the child. . . . As long as I’m acting in the interest of the kid, I’m protected in what I do.”

The calls she made to other parents concerning the Johnsons, she said, were standard procedure.

“Once someone calls and says a perpetrator molested one person but has access to others, we must do something. I have to go out and question people. How do you do it without identifying the accused? The law doesn’t say I have to protect him. The law says I have to see the potential victims face to face. I have to tell them, ‘This might have happened.’ ”

Kirkland expressed no more satisfaction with the system than did David.

“It seems you can never have a middle balance,” she said. “I wish you could. It’s great that it’s opened up, that sexual abuse is dealt with now, but the balance always swings so sharply. Right now it’s against the accused. There must be a better way. Now everyone looks for sexual molestation everywhere. The pendulum has swung too far the other way.”

Kirkland mentioned that last point more than once during our lunch, so just before leaving, I asked her why she had done so. She hesitated, then answered:

“I got referred to DCS myself once, two years ago. My daughter, 10, was playing ‘having a baby’ with a 4-year-old neighbor girl. This was once considered natural kid sex play, but now it got reported. The DCS showed up, wondering whether my daughter was being molested. The caseworker took her into another room and questioned her. . . . It was dropped, but still. It’s like a Kafka novel. . . . I do not trust anyone saying absolutes. I cannot tell the truth. How can they?”

BY THE THIRD WEEK of the Johnsons’ experience, though, absolute attitudes were abundant. The certainty of their opinions was driving people to act.

Some started rising to argue in defense of the Johnsons. One was Julie’s friend and neighbor Diane, who protested to the DCS and without hesitation regularly continued to bring her daughter to play at Adam’s house. In time, Diane grew so bothered she felt compelled to call the mother of the molested girl. She knew and liked this woman--their daughters regularly played at each other’s homes. She lay awake one night, rehearsing what she’d say, then picked up the phone the next morning.

“DCS has called me,” Diane began. “I want you to know you absolutely have the wrong people. I’d put everything I have out there on that. What’s happened to your daughter, I feel really badly, I wish it never to happen. But she must be protecting someone close to her. When you find out, I hope you can deal with it.”

Others responded quite differently. Although no accusations involved events at the church preschool, the Johnsons’ minister nevertheless felt it necessary to send a letter to all families enrolled there, advising them that an allegation of child molestation had been made against the parent of a child attending the preschool. Some of those so informed apparently managed to connect the report to the Johnsons after learning that the accused couple had left the preschool. This, at least, is what the Johnson’s pediatrician later heard from one of his other patients who belonged to the congregation.

The minister and others from the church also began calling the DCS and the police station.

“This case got more attention than normal because we were being contacted regularly,” Detective Sullivan said. “The church, the minister and their lawyer called me often. The minister was asking what they should do. He wanted to consult me. I avoided doing that. They were worrying about liability. One call, the minister expressed the wish we’d prosecute, so we would solve their problem.”

When I called the minister one Sunday night at his home, he said he was “shocked” to learn that the Johnsons had approached a journalist.

“This just won’t die,” he said. “I wish we could put this behind us. . . . We did not point the finger at them. We did not make the accusation. We were just concerned for our children. Our main concern was the ethics of the situation. We were concerned with protecting the children and with maintaining privacy. We consulted counsel and followed their advice. . . . The (Johnsons) do not understand our situation. They have dumped all their rage on us. In hindsight, I feel the congregation and leadership handled this as best as they could. . . . There is a difference of opinion about whether they are guilty or not. I don’t know. I’m not a professional in that area. I tried to stay clear of that judgment. I’ve had no training, no preparation in this. It’s an imperfect situation.”

The minister agreed to meet for an interview, but insisted that neither he nor his church be named in any article. “I don’t want the church involved,” he said, more than once and with considerable feeling. I agreed, since I wasn’t identifying anyone else by name, but when I called him a week later, the clergyman all the same had changed his mind.

“I’ve said all there is to say,” he explained. “Our concern was with protecting the children and maintaining privacy. That was our concern.”

In our first conversation, the minister had given me the name of the psychologist who’d been meeting regularly with the little girl, and he urged that I call her. I now did so.

THE THERAPIST turned out to be a middle-aged woman with a master’s degree in social work and some dozen years of clinical experience in the field of child abuse. She spoke with deliberation.

She’d started out assuming kids never lie, she told me, but over the years she’d learned that wasn’t so. Kids don’t always tell the truth. She’s had 4- and 5-year-olds make things up. She’s had one parent lead a child into saying things against the other parent. She’s been able to poke holes in more than one kid’s story.

All the same, there was absolutely no question in her mind about the Johnson case.

“This little girl was molested, and by the man she accuses,” she said. “The story does not change--not the precise details, not the affect. I ask what she saw, she says, ‘I didn’t see, I felt.’ I raise topics for the third time, she says, ‘I already told you.’ She is articulate and bright.”

I asked whether the little girl might be transferring the charges to David from someone else.

“I never see kids transfer in that way,” she said. “Non-credible kids are few and far between, and it’s usually a situation where they are angry at a parent. Rarely do we get a kid saying something false about someone outside the family. They have no investment in accusing such a person. They would have to be truly psychotic.”

The therapist’s words unsettled me greatly, more so than any I’d heard in all my interviews, for she appeared assured and certain, but not at all given to quick, absolute judgments. Unlike the others, she’d had the opportunity to talk regularly with the little girl. In the face of her comments, echoing so closely those of the caseworker and detective, I had to wonder what exactly my story was really about. This late in my inquiry, the truth seemed to be receding, not getting closer. Or rather, it seemed to shift from interview to interview, like a chameleon.

The Johnsons had brought their story to me and had imagined my article would be an account of the experiences of a wrongly accused couple. But I was gradually realizing I couldn’t tell exactly that story.

When I so informed them, the Johnsons hesitated only briefly before saying they still wanted the article written, whatever contrary opinions it contained. At least people then would know what they’d been through, they explained, and how the system worked.

Perplexed, I found myself rereading the pages of the Johnsons’ deeply anguished 35-page journal, wondering whether it could conceivably be a masterful literary con job, thinking that prospect so hard to fathom. I spoke to a DCS caseworker not connected to this case, who said perpetrators often kept such logs and warned that it was impossible for a normal mind to understand one controlled by a monstrous pathology. I considered David’s nature. By now it was apparent he did not strike everyone as a particularly gentle man--he’d offended people in the system with his insistent temper. Did that prove he was a molester, though? During my visits to the Johnsons’ home for interviews, I watched their interactions with their children, and I spent time alone with their son, never sensing anything remotely out of the ordinary. What did that prove?

What didn’t I know? What was in case files not available to me? What hadn’t I been told in interviews, which, by wavering between the hypothetical and the particular, unavoidably left some matters murky?

One morning I called the specialist who’d administered David Johnson’s polygraph test. He is a former military, U.S. Defense Department and Los Angeles Police Department instructor and examiner who has operated his own private testing firm for 16 years. In the past five years, he told me, his business has greatly changed because of the rising volume of molestation accusations. Where he once mainly tested people accused of murder or assault, he now sees a flood of accused molesters, 300 to 400 annually, 75% of his total workload. He felt he’d come to know well, over time, the differing patterns between the guilty and innocent. He was willing to be named, and I don’t name him here only to protect other people’s identities. “(Johnson) absolutely without a doubt is telling the truth,” he said. “His test is not borderline or equivocal. . . . There is no question. . . . The victims in these cases not infrequently point elsewhere. . . . I absolutely do not hesitate to say this man is telling the truth. . . .”

The sense of confusion I felt by now was mirrored exactly in the words I soon after heard from the Johnsons’ pediatrician. He warmly endorsed them and talked of David’s being made a “scapegoat,” but then he nervously balked at unequivocally declaring their innocence. “You can’t say that,” he said. “You don’t know what’s inside me, I don’t know what’s inside you. . . . Even after all your research, I doubt you’ll ever be able to decide.”

Investigating a report of a child molestation seemed a daunting task indeed. All sorts of dangers were apparent. Nationwide, some 60% of all molestation reports end up being labeled unfounded, although no one can say how many are false and how many just unprovable. In Los Angeles County, the DCS received 19,121 sexual abuse reports in the year ended last June. The department says half of all its abuse and neglect reports end up being labeled unfounded or not a cause for intervention, even though it does not keep records specifically for that category. Another 30% to 40% get handled only briefly. How many molestations and how many false accusations went uncorrected amid these numbers?

Neither the therapist’s judgment nor the polygrapher’s comments, both so certain, were the sort that the law allows to be offered as fact. The therapist couldn’t get up in court and testify that the little girl was telling the truth any more than the polygraph expert could proclaim Johnson’s innocence. The polygraph exam was not admissible at all, and the therapist could testify only about general patterns of behavior in such young children.

There was a time not long ago when therapists were more readily accepted as expert, but then came a string of problematic prosecutions in which the truth proved elusive. Lawyers found that various therapists held differing opinions. So had I. In 1984, I talked with several therapists who’d questioned the children involved in a reported sexual abuse ring in Jordan, Minn. Some of the therapists flatly told me that such young children could never make up specific sexual stories or lie about who molested them; some explained at length why and how the children could be led into saying anything, and a good number said they just didn’t know.

The accusations against the Johnsons didn’t involve the type of custody dispute that often generates false reports. All the specialists who talked to the little girl believed her, without qualification. So did others, though, who’d done nothing more than read the case file. “You develop where you don’t trust anyone in this business,” the therapist had told me as I was leaving her office. Had their constant exposure to abhorrent behavior sharpened these people’s instincts or left them overly inclined to make their case?

Why would this little girl single out Adam’s daddy if she wasn’t telling the truth? Why would the Johnsons be urging an unrestricted examination of their now-closed case if their statement wasn’t true?

There were two unimaginable possibilities in the Johnson case. But one had to be true.

THREE weeks and one day after Sam Rowan first arrived on their doorstep, another caseworker called the Johnsons, their first contact with the DCS since that indelible Sunday.

“Is your father-in-law still staying there with you?” the caseworker asked Julie.

“What?” Julie said. She was incredulous. David’s father had left after the first two nights.

Following the initial contacts, it turned out the DCS file had gone to a regional office whose jurisdiction includes the Johnsons’ home. From what I was later told, it seems likely that the Johnson report went to the bottom of one caseworker’s pile there, since it had already been acted upon, and didn’t reach the top for three weeks.

“No, my father-in-law is no longer at our house,” Julie said.

“Didn’t you have a deal with the police that he was to stay until your children got scanned?” the caseworker asked.

“Let me tell you about that scanning. . ,” Julie began.

When she’d heard all of Julie’s story, the caseworker proposed that they start over: She wanted to come visit them. She wanted the Johnsons to take their children for the scan team exam they’d never received. If their pediatrician and the scan team said they were OK, the caseworker suggested, then we’ll close the case.

David, bristling when he heard of this proposal, called the new caseworker’s supervisor and protested. “My kids are safe,” he said. “Our pediatrician will tell you the same thing. I am not going to allow you people to do any more harm to my family.”

Five days later, on Friday, having heard nothing more, David called both the detective and the DCS. Later that day, he wrote in his log:

“I asked the detective straight out whether there were plans to charge me or not. In a disappointed tone, he said as far as he was concerned the case was closed, and after our last discussion he never wanted to talk with me again. . . . I then called the DCS supervisor and asked what was happening with them. She then rifled through her papers trying to remember my case and who I was. After a few minutes she found it and informed me that the caseworker had called our pediatrician and they also had closed the case. I didn’t bother asking her why she hadn’t called to tell me that. . . .”

In time, I learned there never had been much likelihood of the Johnsons being charged or prosecuted. In fact, not much of anything had been happening during the three long weeks their case hung in limbo.

The police detective had interviewed the little girl and her family, the girl’s psychologist and physician and the Johnsons. That was all. There’d been no deeper look at the Johnsons, no additional questioning of their son after Sam Rowan’s few minutes with him that first Sunday night. Nor had anyone further assessed the little girl’s family. The district attorney’s office had not asked for more. There was no point.

“In a sense, the case was doomed from the start,” Detective Sullivan explained. “I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. You tend to categorize cases when you get them. This one, soon as I picked it up, I saw that there were no witnesses and the victim was a very young age. Everyone who talks to her could be said to have asked leading questions. At that age, she has to be led. To not prosecute was an agonizing decision, but it wasn’t a close one. It was inevitable. It’s just that no one wanted to make it.”

“I’m not going to tell you this guy did it or did not do it, because I don’t know,” said the deputy district attorney in charge of the case. “There’s a very good chance this happened as the little girl said. But ‘probably’ is the threshold in civil cases, not criminal prosecutions. I have rules as a prosecutor. In this situation, the ball is in the (accuser’s) court, and it’s difficult for a little girl like that to get on the stand. What you need is an older child, or an adult eyewitness, or corroboration. It’s an imperfect system. You have to balance between the needs of a small child and the whole panoply of constitutional rights. That balance causes the imperfection.”

After the case was dropped, David and Julie--angrier at the minister than at the DCS caseworkers, whom they believed were simply doing their jobs to the best of their abilities and training--demanded and got a meeting with church leaders. There, accompanied by David’s parents, they expressed their grievances, while the minister disputed their perception of his role. The Johnsons requested a written apology. None was offered.

Back home later that night, David wrote in his log:

“I really feel they’re ignorant of what is the right thing and need the advice of counsel to tell them. That is quite sad since counsel really is not concerned with doing the right thing. They are only concerned with not doing the wrong thing.”

When they met with me, the Johnsons talked at length about their feelings of frustration and shame and isolation. They were avoiding involvement with the children or the parents at the new school where they’d placed Adam. “Kids can come over, but their parents have to be here with them,” Julie said. “Or we go to the park.”

Of course, the little girl’s family also was feeling great pain. I repeatedly called their house, but heard only the little girl herself, speaking sweetly on the answering machine. If I could have visited them, I very well might have found another anguished journal in their home, and certainly feelings of grief and anger. Weeks after first reporting the molestation, they sent to the DCS’s Sam Rowan a single-spaced, five-page letter recounting in fine detail everything their daughter had told them about the molestation. They had their own frustrating meeting, this one with the deputy district attorney and detective, who explained why they couldn’t prosecute the case. Then the family learned I was working on this story and, through a lawyer, asked that it not be published, or at least that it not identify them. Later, they wrote their own letter to The Times’ editors, strongly protesting what they understood to be this article’s fundamental themes.

They objected to any story that equated the plights of victims and accused molesters or cast doubt on disclosures of sexual abuse. They feared that the story I was preparing would “make it sound like a gray fog in which all questions are open, in which guilt or innocence has no clear meaning, and therefore in which children’s reports may, or may not, be true.” They believed that the “implicit message” of such an article would provide a “green or amber light to molesters and will allow horrors, such as that inflicted on our daughter, to continue.” Objecting to my connection with Julie Johnson, they suspected that this article’s intent might be to “plant a public relations piece in a local newspaper as part of an accused, but not cleared, child molester’s strategy to reclaim apparently lost honor. . . .” In urging that this article be “jettisoned,” they said, “We want to be buffered from the outside world as time and treatment help us.”

THE LAST person I spoke with happened to be Detective Sullivan, only because he was on vacation when I’d visited the others. He knew which case I was calling about before I gave him any names. It was still fresh in his mind.

“It was a horrible case,” he said. “There are no winners. All losers. I lost sleep over this one. I know the DA did. It’s one of those cases where it eats at you. One of the things I told (Johnson) was, ‘We’d really like evidence to prove you innocent or guilty, because if you’re guilty, you should be tried, and if you’re innocent, we want to find out who is out there, victimizing others. . . . But unless someone shows us a better way, this is it. Soon as someone gives us a better way, we’d be more than happy to use it.”

We were sitting in the cramped cubbyhole office he shares with two other officers. He’d been talking for an hour now and was finding it difficult to let go of the topic. He lifted a thick pile of pink report forms from the in basket on his desk and waved them before my eyes.

“Thing is, I have to live with cases like this day in and day out,” he said. “This case stands out only because of how vocal the suspect was. Otherwise, it’s not unusual. The fact is, more go this way than don’t.”

I stood to leave soon after, and as I did the detective asked me a question that made me chuckle, because I thought he was kidding. But then he repeated himself, and I saw not humor but yearning in his eyes.

“I mean it,” he said. “If you turn up any new evidence, will you let me know? If you learn anything new, will you call me?”