Child Takes the Stand in Buckey Trial : McMartin case: 11-year-old testifies that defendant took nude photos of her. But her testimony is marked by inconsistencies.

The first of three child witnesses scheduled to testify in the trial of McMartin molestation defendant Ray Buckey told jurors Wednesday that she does not remember him performing the sexual acts with which he is charged.

In testimony marked by inconsistencies and memory lapses, however, the nervous 11-year-old insisted that Buckey touched her in a way she did not like and took pictures of her posing in the nude.

The testimony of the girl, who did not take the stand at Buckey’s first trial, had been expected to provide new revelations. Two of the remaining eight counts against Buckey, counts on which the first jury could not agree, involve the girl. He is accused of both vaginal and anal penetration.

But when asked specifically about the alleged crimes, the witness said she had no memory of such acts now--seven years since she was last enrolled at the Manhattan Beach nursery school.

“When you attended McMartin, did Ray Buckey put anything inside your vagina?” defense attorney Danny Davis asked her at the start of cross-examination.

“Not that I can remember,” the child answered.

“Did Ray Buckey put anything in the hole in your bottom?” Davis inquired.

“Not that I know of,” she replied.

Prosecutors maintain they can still prove the charges through testimony from the child’s mother and the physician who examined her and determined she had been sodomized.

“She’s nervous and her memory isn’t that great,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Pam Ferrero said.

The defense said it had “disproved” the allegations.

“The district attorney has failed in its case, legally, factually, even before I finish cross-examination,” Davis said. “I asked her in common-sense language and she said no to both (allegations). Now we are at how she came to believe anything happened to her.”

Dressed in a ruffled, flower-print dress, her face framed by long blonde hair, the youngster was accompanied to court by her parents, who have already testified. Although she testified before a county grand jury and at the preliminary hearing, the child’s mother said her daughter had not felt “strong enough” to take the stand at the first trial of Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey.

The jury in that proceeding found Buckey not guilty of most of the charges and acquitted his mother. Even without her testimony, however, the panel was divided over the counts involving the girl.

During three hours on the witness stand Wednesday, the child said Buckey had touched her and that “I didn’t like the feeling.”

“I was sitting on Ray’s lap in the corner (of his classroom) and he was touching me in a spot I didn’t like. With his hand. In the vagina and the bottom.”

Minutes later, however, when asked again if Buckey had ever touched her bottom, she answered, “Not that I can remember right now.”

Asked whether the defendant had ever put his penis anywhere on her body, she replied, “I think he did. On my vagina.”

The girl also described playing what has come to be known as the “naked movie star” game: “Well, you take off your clothes and you pose and then Ray would take a picture of you,” she explained, reciting the sing-song rhyme said to accompany the game.

And the child said she watched Buckey stab a turtle to death to underscore threats: “He told me not to tell my parents (about the sex acts) or else he’d kill them.”

She said she was frightened that Buckey would hurt her, or come to her home, and asked her father to have a burglar alarm installed.

Earlier this week, the girl’s mother testified that she begged not to go to school on several occasions and extracted a promise that she would not be left at McMartin past lunchtime. The alleged molestations were said to have taken place in the afternoons, when Buckey was alone with children.

“I forced her through the gates of the school,” the mother ruefully recalled.

The jury also viewed a videotaped interview with the girl six years ago in which she indicated to a therapist that she had been sodomized and forced to participate in oral sex.

In a separate development, the defense dropped its request for a court order halting the scheduled demolition of the former McMartin Pre-School. Parents of students, with the current owner’s permission, have already destroyed most of the Manhattan Beach Boulevard property while excavating in search of a supposed subterranean tunnel and secret room that several children have described.

The parents say they believe that objects found underground in soft earth indicate that such a tunnel once existed.