Buckey Jury Comes Close to Impasse on Six Counts : McMartin case: The judge orders members to continue deliberations despite their trouble in reaching a consensus. They earlier reached a verdict on second charge.

The jury in the McMartin Pre-School molestation retrial came perilously close Monday to an impasse on six of eight counts against Raymond Buckey, but a deadlock was averted when the judge ordered the panel to resume deliberations.

The jury on Monday also reached a verdict on a second charge against the former nursery teacher. However, that verdict remained sealed, as did another verdict reached Friday.

Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg ordered the jurors to continue deliberating after they sent him a note saying they were “having some trouble” reaching a consensus on the six remaining counts in a case that turned the nation’s attention to the problem of child sex abuse.

“We appear to be hung on six counts,” the jury’s note said.

The jurors had begun their third week of deliberations in the case Monday morning. Soon after receiving the judge’s order in the late afternoon, they broke off for the day and were to resume deliberating Tuesday.

Buckey, 32, is accused of molesting three young girls at the now-closed Virginia McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach from 1979 until 1983. The former preschool teacher has steadfastly maintained his innocence.

At the end of a marathon first trial in January, Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 63, were acquitted of 52 other molestation counts involving a total of 11 children.

The first jury deadlocked on the eight counts on which Buckey is being retried.

The verdicts in January climaxed a trial that lasted nearly three years and cost $13.2 million, making it the longest, costliest criminal trial in U.S. history. The greatly scaled down retrial has lasted more than three months.

If convicted, Buckey could be sentenced to up to 22 years in state prison. He would be credited for the nearly five years he spent in custody following his 1984 arrest.

The core of the prosecution was the testimony of the three girls, who said Buckey molested them, forced them to play sex games such as “naked movie star” and frightened them into silence.

But when pressed by defense lawyer Danny Davis for details of the alleged sex abuse, all three girls repeatedly said, “I don’t remember.”

From the beginning, the defense has argued that the children were brainwashed by overzealous therapists at the Children’s Institute International in Los Angeles. The therapists, the defense argued, manipulated the children into leveling false allegations.

The girls, now ages 14, 12, and 11, were allegedly molested when they were ages 2 to 5.

During his cross-examination of the girls, Davis noted that their testimony at the retrial often contradicted testimony they gave at the first trial and in videotaped interviews with the child therapists.

The county grand jury handed down its initial indictments containing scores of charges in March, 1984. But all charges against five co-defendants, including Buckey’s sister and grandmother, were dismissed for lack of evidence.

The preschool was closed by the state in January, 1984, after the molestation allegations surfaced. In May, it was razed to make way for an office building, but not before a group of parents dug up the foundation in an inconclusive search for secret tunnels mentioned by some children.