Buckey’s 2nd Trial Opens in McMartin Molestation Case

The retrial of McMartin Pre-School defendant Ray Buckey began Monday, nearly seven years after his first arrest and with the toddlers he allegedly molested now entering adolescence.

Although reduced in scope from seven defendants and hundreds of charges to one defendant charged with eight counts of molestation, the proceeding opened with a sense of deja vu --the same alleged scenario, the same defense.

There was even the same promise of bizarre twists: Scarcely half an hour after its start, the trial had already lost one juror. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg excused the distraught woman, one of six alternates chosen only last week, after she began coughing violently. She explained to the judge that she was upset about a fire that had engulfed her boat during a weekend family outing in which she suffered smoke inhalation.

“We’ve got a little bit of an abortive beginning,” sighed Weisberg. “But I’m sure we’ll pick up. . . .”

The juror incident seemed ominous, coming on the heels of a first trial that teetered for months on the brink of mistrial as illness, inattention and job problems eroded its jury and depleted the supply of alternates. But the final 12 panelists lasted nearly three years, until last January, ultimately finding Buckey, 31, not guilty of most of the charges against him and completely acquitting his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey.

The district attorney’s office, after much lobbying by McMartin parents, decided to retry Buckey, a former teacher at his family’s Manhattan Beach nursery school, on eight of the 13 charges on which the earlier jury could not agree.

Prosecutors said the maximum sentence he could receive is 22 years.

Outside the courtroom after opening statements, defense attorney Danny Davis compared the prosecutiors to World War II Japanese pilots on suicide missions.

“This is nothing but a kamikaze run before the primary (election),” Davis said, referring to Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner’s candidacy for California attorney general.

“There is no gas for a return trip for Ira Reiner,” he said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Joe Martinez, however, said he was confident.

“We feel we have the three best children and the eight best counts. You can’t get any better than that,” the prosecutor said.

Buckey’s retrial began with considerably less hoopla and considerably more strictures than his preliminary hearing and first trial. The judge excluded cameras and recording equipment from much of the first day’s proceedings, forbade hallway interviews on the 11th floor of the downtown Criminal Courts Building, and repeatedly prodded the defense to speed up its opening statement.

The proceedings, snidely dubbed “McMartin II” by Davis, attracted few spectators besides reporters, Buckey’s relatives, a half-dozen McMartin parents and a handful of regular court watchers.

Buckey, with a deep tan and wearing a dark business suit, listened intently.

His second attorney, John Wagner, yawned as the day wore on.

Martinez worked a crossword puzzle hidden in his legal pad.

The lawyers’ opening statements were detailed, matter of fact and sometimes rambling, in contrast to the punch served up at the earlier trial by carefully prepared statements in which the prosecution spoke of trust and betrayal and the defense of a mysterious, unidentified enemy.

“I don’t know in what condition these children will come to you. I haven’t talked to them,” Martinez told jurors. “They’re now young ladies on the verge of puberty. I don’t know how much they will recall, how much they have repressed.”

He said evidence will show that the decades-old McMartin school, which enjoyed “reputedly good success,” was altered by the arrival of the founder’s grandson, Ray Buckey, first as an aide and later as a teacher.

“Things began to change when Ray Buckey came into the picture,” he said, adding that it was only then that students began exhibiting signs of molestation.

He said the prosecution will prove its case through the testimony of three child victims, their parents, the physicians who examined them, and videotaped interviews conducted at Children’s Institute International, a Los Angeles child abuse diagnostic and treatment center.

Those controversial videotapes were cited by jurors in Buckey’s first trial as having led children to say and believe they had been molested and making it impossible to determine what, if anything, really happened.

In his opening statment, however, defense attorney Davis said the clouding of the truth began earlier, with a letter sent by Manhattan Beach police to 200 parents of McMartin students, informing them that Ray Buckey was under investigation.

“Our fundamental position is that this letter eradicated all opportunity to ever know what did or didn’t happen” at McMartin, Davis said.

As time passed and children and parents talked with each other and went to Children’s Institute International for their interviews, further contamination occurred, he said.

“We aim to prove everything that followed CII was so tainted with processes of the puppet lady (a reference to Kee MacFarlane, the therapist in charge of the interviews, during which puppets were utilized) that even today it is impossible to separate fact from fiction.”

Davis contended that no child ever spontaneously accused Buckey of molesting him or her.

“You will have a chance to see that man accused of these heinous crimes and look directly into his eyes and soul” to learn the truth, the defense lawyer said, nodding toward his client.

The first child witness is expected to take the stand today.