Tapes of Children Decided the Case for Most Jurors

For 30 months, they sat together in the same box, mute participants in an exhausting, emotional legal drama. They listened to more than a hundred witnesses, children, police officers, medical experts, the accused. Pounds of evidence--photographs, documents, diaries, checkbooks, even several pairs of underwear--were brought before them. Videotapes of children sharing their dark, sometimes bizarre accounts with counselors were played, rewound and played again for their benefit.

Throughout it all, the eight men and four women jurors in the McMartin Pre-School molestation case gave nothing away, surrendered no clues as to which way they might be leaning.

On Thursday, though, it was the jurors’ turn. They acquitted Ray Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, on 52 counts of child molestation conspiracy, and then, in press conferences and private interviews, explained how they had sorted through the tangle of evidence to make their judgment.

It was not, many of the jurors said, an easy decision.

“Looking at it now, I guess it’s amazing we got through it,” said juror Danny L. Kindle, 33, a grocery store clerk.

Added Mark Bassett, 33, a computer analyst: “It really was extremely stressful because, win or lose, it’s clear that an awful lot of people have suffered an awful lot in this case.”

Nine of the 11 jurors who agreed to be interviewed said they believed that some children were abused, but that the prosecution, for the most part, had failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Buckeys were responsible.

Some jurors said they were skeptical about medical evidence and confused by widely disparate opinions from experts on what the evidence meant. Others were put off by the fantastic tales of animal mutilation, satanic ritual and blood-drinking, which seemed to taint even the seemingly better-documented cases. And still others complained that they would have voted guilty on some counts had the children’s testimony not seemed to change over the nearly three years of trial.

For most of the jurors, though, the whole case seemed to turn on videotaped interviews of the children, which captured sessions in which young boys and girls employed puppets to describe alleged sexual molestations.

Jurors said they were left with serious doubts about the stories the children told on the videotapes. The interviewers asked leading and coercive questions, the jurors said, and this robbed the children of their credibility.

“The key evidence that swayed me was the interview tapes,” jury foreman Luis Chang told The Times. “The questions that were given to the children were . . . too biased, too leading. There was something there, physical molestation, we could see. (But) trying to tie Ray Buckey into it was pretty hard.”

Most of the criticism was reserved for a private child therapy center, the Children’s Institute International, which counseled and interviewed the children, and for police investigators who, early in the case, sent a form letter to McMartin parents in Manhattan Beach asking whether their children had been molested.

Critics have charged that both tactics inflamed emotions in the upscale community where the McMartin Pre-School was located, inflated the case out of proportion and in effect diluted the children’s credibility.

“The children were never allowed to say, in their own words, what happened to them,” said juror John Breese, 51, a medical technician and grandfather of five. “When the interviewers interviewed the children, all the questions were leading.”

Kee Mac Farlane, the CII therapist who supervised the interviews of the McMartin youngsters, defended her agency’s techniques. She said inconsistencies in the testimony of children is normal, adding that it is always difficult to prove child abuse cases under stringent reasonable-doubt requirements.

“I didn’t put words in their mouth,” Mac Farlane said late Thursday at CII’s Koreatown facility. “I enabled them to get over their fears and testify in court. The jurors’ standard of judging a child’s credibility was the same one used for adults. . . . These are not miniature adults.”

Manhattan Beach police officials said the department would have no comment because of still pending civil litigation.

In the interviews, jurors described the nine weeks of deliberations that produced the not guilty verdicts on 52 counts and left them deadlocked on 13 others. A mistrial was declared in the 13 counts.

The jurors said they began deliberations by separating each child’s case. Slowly and methodically, they reviewed and debated the counts that related to each child. They would name the relevant witnesses for each child’s case, including parents and doctors, and pore over the appropriate testimony.

There was a lot to consider. Eleven children. Sixty-five counts. More than 60,000 pages of testimony from 124 witnesses. One thousand exhibits. Ten videotapes.

When they hit a snag and could not agree on a particular verdict, they would put that count aside for later deliberation. As they accumulated verdicts, they would go on to the next alleged victim.

At times, there was spirited debate over whether a child could be believed, according to some jurors. Much of the conflict centered on how badly “contaminated” they considered a child’s testimony to be.

On the apparently rare occasion when tempers flared, jury foreman Chang usually ordered a break and things cooled off. All in all, most jurors said, they worked professionally and carefully.

“There was no moment of crystallization when the decisions came together,” said Bassett, whose computer firm folded during his jury service. “The verdicts we divided into blocks. There was an awful lot of common evidence per child. On determining that the evidence wasn’t believable we decided ‘not guilty,’ and turned the decisions in.

“Usually we turned them in when we had finished going through the charges associated with a single child, sometimes we turn in blocks of charges for two children in one day.”

Finally, the jury deadlocked on 13 counts where at least some members of the panel felt convinced of Ray Buckey’s guilt.

Juror Sally Cordova, 27, a cashier for Vons markets, said she voted guilty on 11 of the 13 counts that ended in deadlock. Twelve involved Ray Buckey and the 13th was a shared conspiracy count. Three of the counts involved an alleged victim whom Cordova believed.

“I believed the statements that the girl first made on tape during the CII interview,” Cordova said. “The first interview gave what I thought was concrete information when she accused Ray of molestation. I believed her on those three (early) counts. I believe that Ray did it.”

Asked whether she is bothered by the final outcome, Cordova said, “I feel we did the best we could.”

Kindle said he leaned toward guilty verdicts for Ray Buckey, but eventually was convinced by the others that some children seemed to have had “words put in their mouths” by their interrogators--though he remains unconvinced that all of the children were lying.

And with some of the older children, he decided that the statute of limitations probably had expired. Such was the case of one girl who accused Buckey of molesting her during the so-called “naked movie star” game in 1979 and 1980.

“It was pretty definite that she had been molested,” Kindle said. “She pointed the finger toward Ray. She said Ray did it. But I think in that case, the statute of limitations had run out. . . .

“After you hear so many children say, ‘Ray did it,’ even if they were led, it’s hard for me to believe that they were lying.”

But others were not swayed by the testimony against the Buckeys.

“The evidence was not concrete,” said Barbara Celestine, who works for the U.S. Air Force in El Segundo and is a mother of two.

Celestine, who filled 18 books with notes during the trial, said many of the children’s statements seemed rehearsed or scripted and added that the alleged victims who testified did not show the emotion or fear she would have expected.

Dante Ochoa, a 41-year-old state employee, blamed the police department letter for severely damaging the prosecution’s case.

“That right there almost wrecked the chances of the prosecution,” Ochoa, 41, said, adding he was convinced no molestation had ever taken place. “There were incredible missteps that contributed to this big mess. That was a shotgun approach to gathering data.”

One juror, a retired, 75-year-old structural draftsman who asked that his name not be published, said he was determined to vote not guilty as soon as the testimony was over--especially where Peggy McMartin Buckey was concerned.

“Look at it this way,” said this juror. “Here’s a woman that has been in this business for, what, 26 years? Isn’t it incredible to believe she would do the things she was accused of doing? You just couldn’t understand how she would get any pleasure out of such feelings.”

This juror said adult eyewitnesses might have changed his mind.

The fantastic nature of many of the children’s stories bewildered jurors.

One was a so-called “lookout game,” in which a child allegedly watched for parents coming to pick up a playmate and notified Buckey as to the imminent arrival.

“Some of the stories became ridiculous,” Bassett said.

“We decided,” he went on, “that there couldn’t have been enough time to run from the window to the room where the molestation was supposed to be happening and for Ray and the children--who were supposed to be naked--to get their clothes on and go out and meet the parents. We figured that all that would have had to take place in 20 seconds or less.

“I didn’t believe it.”

Celestine and Bassett said an alleged incident in which a horse was supposed to have been killed with a baseball bat, and the children made to drink the blood, fed skepticism.

“God, that got to me,” Celestine said. “It was unbelievable.”

Added Bassett: “My father and uncle own a farm that has horses on it. I’ve been around horses. I know they’re fairly big. The thing about killing a horse with a baseball bat. If Ray were to try that, I don’t think the horse would just calmly stand there.”

The trial changed the lives of scores of people, and the jury was not excepted. Some jurors said they sought to maintain their sanity with crossword puzzles and chess games during breaks. Many could not avoid taking the case home with them at night. They had dreams. Several said they will be forever haunted by the experience.

One juror, Cordova, remembered visiting a church at Christmas when her thoughts flashed to allegations by one child that animals were sacrificed at the altar of a Hermosa Beach church, where children were molested.

“Suddenly, the only thing I could think of was the kids back in court,” she said. “Forever, I will be reminded unintentionally of the case. . . . I’m sure it will happen again and again.”

After it was finished, most of the jurors were simply happy to be going home. A few laughed at having received summons for jury duty during the McMartin trial. A couple planned to see each other again.

“After spending a certain amount of time you learn a certain respect,” Bassett said. “It’s like wartime. You’re in the foxhole with your buddies and you have to stick together.”