Key Witness Plays Lesser Role in Second McMartin Trial

Despite the key role played by videotaped interviews with alleged child victims in the first McMartin Pre-School trial, the social worker responsible for those interviews spent only two days on the witness stand at the retrial of defendant Ray Buckey.

Kee MacFarlane (Elias) of Children’s Institute International, a Los Angeles child-abuse diagnostic and treatment center, was called by the prosecution the first time around two years ago and grilled for five weeks.

This month she was subpoenaed as a defense witness in the retrial to explain her controversial methods. These involved the videotaping of interviews of young children that included leading and suggestive questions, playing with puppets and naked dolls with sex organs, drawing, and a “secret machine” said to gobble up “yukky secrets.”

But both sides questioned MacFarlane only briefly this time. The jurors earlier heard taped interviews with three girls whom Buckey is accused of molesting, but attorneys apparently were content to let the tapes stand on their own.

The brevity that characterized MacFarlane’s testimony is typical of the entire retrial, which is expected to conclude by summer’s end. The prosecution presented its case in only 13 days; the defense began June 4 and says it will finish by early July.

The defendant is the only major defense witness who has not yet testified. He is charged with eight counts of molestation involving three youngsters who attended his family’s Manhattan Beach nursery school, counts that the first jury was unable to decide.

During questioning by defense attorney Danny Davis, MacFarlane said she had tried her best to balance the use of “techniques which would enable (the children) to talk to me about something they might be too afraid to talk about” against a need to protect Buckey from being falsely accused.

She said she could have avoided providing children with any information they had not mentioned first, but chose not to for several reasons:

“I only had one chance to get an indication of whether or not something had or hadn’t happened. . . .

“I tried to initially (give them) the opportunity to tell me voluntarily anything they wanted . . . and work my way backwards from that toward more specific information.

“If they did not raise anything that I felt I should inquire into, I felt . . . that I needed to ask them directly, simply, to see how they reacted. . . .”

She said that sexually abused children often do not volunteer information and try to avoid touchy topics.

Davis sought to show that MacFarlane is a self-styled expert, a woman whose previous experience in the field of child sexual abuse was largely administrative and theoretical. He suggested that she used the McMartin case to further her career and pointed out that she was romantically involved with the television newsman who broke the story in early 1984.

During 1983 and l984, about 400 former McMartin students were interviewed at Children’s Institute International, either by MacFarlane or under her supervision. Of those, CII concluded 350 had been sexually abused.

It was at CII that many of the children “disclosed” for the first time that they had been abused, and the district attorney’s office relied on the videotapes in selecting charges to file and children to use as witnesses.

In January, Buckey was found not guilty of most charges against him, and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, was acquitted of all charges. At the time, jurors said the early CII interviews made it impossible to tell later whether the children were testifying from memory or suggestion.

The defense contends that from its start seven years ago, the case was marked by inept investigation and community hysteria.