Buckey Jury Deadlocks; Mistrial Is Declared : McMartin: D.A. Reiner says he won’t seek a third trial. Longest criminal case in history comes to an end.

A mistrial was declared Friday in the retrial of McMartin Pre-School molestation defendant Ray Buckey after the jury said it was “hopelessly and irreversibly hung” on all eight counts.

“It is clear to me that the jury will not reach a verdict in this case,” Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg announced after polling the 12 jurors. “Therefore, it is a legal necessity to declare a mistrial, and I do so.”

Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner announced that a third trial will not be sought, effectively bringing to a vague conclusion what has been called the longest and costliest criminal case in history.

Buckey, flanked by his two attorneys and his girlfriend, smiled as he left the downtown courtroom, stopping to tell reporters:

“I don’t think anybody won in the McMartin case. I know I’m innocent. I pronounced my innocence on Day One. . . . You go into the system presumed innocent. Society says I was innocent coming in, and I’m still innocent because I’ve not been found guilty.”

The 32-year-old former preschool teacher spent five years in jail as the once-expansive molestation case wended its way through the judicial system. At one point, Buckey stood accused with six others, including his mother and grandmother, of participating in ritualistic sexual molestations of pupils at their South Bay preschool. The case is estimated to have cost taxpayers more than $14 million.

The mistrial was ordered after jury foreman Richard Dunham told Weisberg that 15 days of deliberations had done little to move jurors toward unanimity.

“We’re as clear in all our minds as we ever will be,” Dunham said. “I am reasonably clear that people have positioned themselves such that they are in their final spots.”

The foreman said that in the course of their deliberations jurors had voted four times on each count and realigned themselves, with splits ranging from 6 to 6 to 11 to 1. A majority favored acquittal on six counts and split evenly on one. It leaned 8 to 4 for conviction on one count of anal penetration.

Two not-guilty verdicts reached earlier and submitted in sealed form to the judge were returned to the jury earlier Friday because one juror had a change of mind.

Jurors said later they were “frustrated” and “disappointed” by their failure to reach verdicts, complaining that they simply didn’t have enough information to make a firm decision.

“There were too many gaping holes and too much time has passed,” said Michael Carapella, 25, a Los Angeles musician.

Added Mary Scott, 51, a West Los Angeles medical technician: “We just got half a deck and had to play like we had a whole deck.”

Weisberg scheduled a hearing Wednesday to rule on a motion to dismiss the charges against Buckey.

Buckey, free on his own recognizance for the retrial, said Friday he would not relax until after the hearing, explaining: “I’m not finally free--not till I hear that judge say, ‘Sorry, see you later. I never want to see you again in this courtroom.’ ”

Reiner, however, said that the decision not to seek another retrial in the event of a hung jury had been made before Friday.

“It would be reasonable and fair to say, ‘Enough’ at this point,” Reiner said.

The district attorney inherited the complex case in midstream from his predecessor, Robert Philibosian, and it came to represent something of a political albatross. Reiner narrowly lost the Democratic primary for state attorney general this spring, and polls showed the McMartin case played a role in his defeat.

“I think this community has had enough of McMartin,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Joe Martinez, who prosecuted the retrial with Deputy Dist. Atty. Pamela Ferrero. “We gave it our best shot.”

The mistrial concluded a three-month retrial for Buckey, the final chapter in a historic case that began seven years ago.

Stemming from a 2 1/2-year-old boy’s report to his mother that he had been sodomized at his school by a “Mr. Ray,” the case altered scores of lives and careers and focused international attention on the issue of child sexual abuse. Over its long course, three people involved in the case died of unnatural causes, prompting the trial judge to comment that McMartin had “poisoned” everyone it touched.

After nearly three years of trial and nine weeks of jury deliberations, however, Buckey was found not guilty last January of 40 molestation counts and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, was acquitted of all 12 counts against her.

Jurors in the retrial were more sharply divided than their counterparts in Buckey’s first trial. Many members of the initial jury had said they felt Buckey was guilty, but that prosecutors had failed to prove their case “beyond a reasonable doubt,” as required by law.

But Dunham, 38, an engineer from Arcadia, said that while the retrial jurors “felt like these kids were molested . . . it was not clear that Ray Buckey was the one who did it.”

The panel was especially critical of the videotaped interviews with the children conducted by Children’s Institute International, a Los Angeles child abuse diagnostic and treatment center, for methods it found overly leading and suggestive.

Indeed, the only count on which the jury leaned toward conviction was one in which a child appeared on tape to have volunteered that an act of anal penetration had occurred.

They also said the children’s testimony was inconsistent, and that they were confused by the medical evidence.

As word of the mistrial reached Manhattan Beach, an 11-year-old girl who testified at both trials said she is “disappointed and really angry. I thought they’d believe me and say he’s guilty. I sort of think it’s just because we’re kids, and people think all kids lie. . . . But he deserves to be in jail. He knows what he did. He knows he’s a bad person.”

At the same time, the case’s resolution appeared meaningless to many residents of the South Bay, whose views of Buckey’s innocence or guilt solidified long ago. For them, the McMartin case will never be “over.”

“For better or worse, this thing got out of the formal system a long time ago,” said Paul Silva, managing editor of a Manhattan Beach weekly. “People on both sides stopped looking to the courts for some sort of determination.”

Buckey’s father, Charles, agreed. Asked if the mistrial means his son’s name will finally be cleared, he replied: “Of course not. Not at all.”

The McMartin case began in the fall of 1983. It initially included allegations not only of rape, sodomy, oral copulation and other sex crimes, but also of pornographic photography sessions, “naked games,” field trips away from the school for illicit purposes, animal mutilation, threats and satanic-like ritual and sacrifice.

A toddler’s mother complained to Manhattan Beach police that her son had been sodomized by his male teacher, and subsequent physical examinations indicated he had been sexually abused.

Buckey was arrested in September of that year, but was released as the investigation continued and widened to include six other teachers at his family’s Manhattan Beach nursery school, among them his grandmother, dozens of “uncharged suspects,” and eight other South Bay nursery schools.

After police sent a form letter to McMartin families seeking information, a wave of hysteria swept through the affluent beach town. Hundreds of parents took their youngsters to Children’s Institute International for evaluation; the majority were told that their children had been victimized.

In March, 1984, Ray Buckey was rearrested, along with his sister, Peggy Ann Buckey, his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, his grandmother, Virginia McMartin, and teachers Betty Raidor, Babette Spitler and Mary Ann Jackson. A county grand jury had indicted them on 115 counts; that indictment was superseded in May by a criminal complaint charging them with 208 counts involving 41 children.

The case was flawed from the beginning. Then-Dist. Atty. Philibosian, running for reelection, and the media, which caught wind of the investigation, were pressing for action.

Children’s Institute International, deluged with concerned parents, enlisted untrained therapists to assess the children, resulting in videotaped interviews that would later prove embarrassing to the prosecution and provide the defense with grounds for claiming that the alleged victims had been programmed to believe that they had been molested.

Hysteria grew. Hundreds of South Bay children had fallen victim to a nationwide conspiracy and pornography ring, it was alleged; someone spray-painted “Ray Must Die” on the walls of the nursery school and diggings were undertaken in an adjacent vacant lot to search for animal remains.

Later, as a developer prepared to bulldoze the school to make way for an office building, parents dug again, this time in search of underground tunnels and a secret room described by many of the children as the setting for sexual activities. Across the last standing wall, they scrawled in large letters, “We believe the children!”

The 18-month preliminary hearing was marked by frequent shouting matches among three prosecutors, nine defense attorneys and Municipal Judge Aviva Bobb, and lengthy questioning of child witnesses that lasted in one instance for 16 days.

In the end, Bobb ordered all seven defendants to stand trial on 135 charges. The remainder had been dropped after only 14 of the scheduled child witnesses came forward to testify, including one who testified by closed-circuit television under a new state law passed especially for the McMartin case.

But a week later, in January, 1986, the new district attorney--Reiner--dropped charges against five of the seven defendants, citing “incredibly weak evidence,” and decided to proceed only against Ray Buckey and his mother.

During the three-year trial, nine of 11 named victims took the witness stand, all sticking to their earlier accounts but for minor inconsistencies, their testimony bolstered by that of a pediatrician who had examined them. Both Buckeys testified and denied all the allegations.

The prosecution sought to show that the children had been sexually abused repeatedly but silenced for years by threats, and that their child-like efforts to tell their parents that something was wrong had been ignored or misinterpreted.

Defense lawyers, contending that nothing improper ever happened at the school, said the children had been programmed by therapists to believe that something bad had happened to them. They spoke of a witch hunt. Buckey was held without bail through most of the trial, and only in its latter stages was he allowed, with help from supporters, to post $3 million bail.

Buckey’s retrial was a scaled-down version of his earlier trial. The children’s testimony was predictable and devoid of emotion, taking on a rote quality as they answered questions in court for the fourth time. Toddlers at the time of their alleged molestation, one alleged victim who testified at the retrial is now a teen-ager while the other two are approaching adolescence.

Weisberg was chosen to preside after the previous trial judge, William Pounders, discussed the case in the media after the first jury finished its business, prompting defense complaints. The prosecution team of Deputy Dist. Attys. Lael Rubin and Roger Gunson also was replaced.

A second defense attorney, John Wagner, was appointed to aid Buckey’s lawyer, Danny Davis, who began suffering from sporadic back problems that delayed proceedings.

Both sides called far fewer witnesses--46, compared to 124 in the first trial--and testimony was completed in less than eight weeks. Prosecution witnesses included three alleged child victims, their parents, and the pediatrician who examined them; defense witnesses included the defendant, fellow teachers who were once accused, and the coroner of London, who was called to cast doubt on the reliability of the medical evidence against Buckey.

The sole emotional moment in the retrial came when a mother broke down on the witness stand when asked what her daughter had told her about the alleged molestations. Glaring at Buckey, she burst out, “I’m so angry at you I could kill you right now!”

Near the end, weary parents were philosophical about the outcome:

“The victory (for the families involved) may or may not come from the courtroom,” one mother said as the case went to the jury. “The significant victories are that we found out our kids were molested and got the appropriate treatment for them. That the case resulted in changes in the judicial system. And that there is now a tremendous international awareness of child molestation.

“Either way the verdict goes, we have won.”

Times staff writers Paul Feldman, Shawn Hubler, Carol McGraw and Terry Pristin contributed to this story.