Abuser or Abused? : Ruling Triggers Questions Over Who’s Real Victim in N.J. Molestation Case

In the summer of 1984, Margaret Kelly Michaels, fresh out of college in her hometown of Pittsburgh, came here with hopes of finding a job in the theater. She wrote poetry and had studied acting. And like thousands of other young people drawn here each year, she imagined that, somehow, she would find her niche in the big city.

Instead, she found something quite different.

Within a year, she had been branded one of the area’s most vile criminals, a demon-like woman who was said to have sexually molested dozens of young children at the day-care center where she worked.

When a judge sentenced her to 47 years in prison, prosecutors and parents decried her treatment as too lenient.

The case became part of a horrifying phenomenon of the 1980s, in which reports of mass child abuse became common just as a generation of parents came to rely on day-care workers to watch over their toddlers and preschoolers.

In almost every instance of alleged mass abuse, an initial report triggered a wave of new accusations, often running into the hundreds, all of which had gone undetected for months or even years.

Quite often, as in the notorious case at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, years of investigation resulted in dropped charges or “not guilty” verdicts. But unlike others accused, Michaels was convicted and imprisoned.

How could this intelligent and articulate young woman have performed what an appeals court described as “virtually incomprehensible heinous and bizarre acts” on 3- and 4-year-olds without anyone noticing?

She was convicted of having inserted knives, forks and spoons into the anuses, penises and vaginas of the children. None of the children spoke of these crimes, however, until their parents and investigators questioned them.

After weeks of interviews, a state investigator came to believe that Michaels had molested all 51 children at the day-care center, even those who had never been in her classes. And after a nine-month trial, a jury believed it too.

But last month, after Michaels had served five years in prison, a New Jersey appeals court overturned the conviction and criticized the state’s handling of the case.

Now, the initial verdict in State of New Jersey vs. Margaret Kelly Michaels raises a larger question: Was this indeed an example of mass child abuse, or rather the abuse of an innocent person?

For their part, prosecutors in Essex County, N.J., say they are undeterred by the appeals court reversal and will ask the state Supreme Court to reinstate the conviction. They remain convinced that the children’s disclosures were true.

“By no stretch of the imagination was this some sort of vindication of her,” John S. Redden, an assistant county prosecutor, says of the appeals court ruling.

Michaels, free on $75,000 bail, is eager to talk about the case. But she is angry too: Angry that investigators coaxed the children to say “bad things” about her. Angrier still that the courts and the press believed them.

“Look at the record in this case. These things were preposterous, yet they were given such credulity by the legal system and the media,” Michaels says. “This was humiliating. It was wrong, and it’s taken eight years of my life.”

The story began in September, 1984, six months after indictments were handed down in Los Angeles in the McMartin case. Unable to find work in New York, Michaels, 23, saw a want ad for a teacher’s aide at the Wee Care school in suburban Maplewood, N.J.

“It seemed like a responsible job, doing something good,” she says. And as the oldest of five in her family, she had had plenty of experience baby-sitting.

As a teacher, Michaels got good marks. The only complaint voiced against her was that her mind sometimes seemed elsewhere--on poetry and her acting. Within a month, she was promoted to a regular teacher’s job and put in charge of a class of 3-year-olds.

Usually an aide joined her in class, but after the children had lunch, she watched over them for 45 minutes during nap time in a room separated from another class by a vinyl partition. At 1:45, a second teacher took over the napping group while Michaels ate her lunch. Altogether, five teachers and two aides watched over the 51 children at the school, located in an Episcopal church.

The appeals court noted, “No complaints of abuse were made during (her) tenure at Wee Care. No children had ever complained of experiencing any difficulties with her. Defendant’s co-employees observed no inappropriate behavior . . . nor did (they) notice any of the children exhibit any fear or reluctance to be with the defendant.”

But in late April, 1985, Michaels resigned to take a better-paying job closer to her apartment--and the trouble soon began with an apparently offhand comment by a young boy. He was visiting his pediatrician when the nurse took his temperature with a rectal thermometer.

“That’s what my teacher does to me at school,” he said.

“Which teacher?” his mother asked.

“Kelly,” he replied.

Puzzled and then worried, his mother learned that no rectal thermometers were used at the school and she contacted the Child Abuse Unit of the Essex County district attorney’s office. The new head of the unit was Sara Sencer McArdle. When the child and his mother came for an interview, she introduced herself to the young boy by handing him a business card.

“I’m your lawyer,” she said. “It’s my job to protect children. It’s my job to make sure that people who touch children never do it again.”

Word of the investigation spread quickly among the families. Just nine days after the boy’s comment, a letter was sent to every parent announcing that the county prosecutors were looking into “serious allegations made by a child against a former employee.”

The parents, alarmed, began asking their children about “inappropriate touching” and other “bad things” that Michaels might have done. The revelations of abuse multiplied.

Michaels first learned of the investigation at 7 a.m. one day when two police officers knocked on her door. “My first thought was that we had played the music too loud,” she recalls.

The accusations took her breath away, she says. But she agreed to go to the station house for questioning, where she waived her rights to a lawyer and denied all accusations.

“They finally said, ‘We can clear this up if you agree to take a lie-detector test,’ ” she says. She agreed, and passed the test. Her denials were truthful, the polygrapher concluded.

But within two weeks, the investigation had moved into high gear. Lou Fonolleras, an investigator with the state Division of Youth and Family Services, began to interview all the children. The transcripts of those interviews, made available to the state appeals court, repeatedly show Fonolleras asking the children, even pleading with them, to reveal some evidence of abuse.

Typically, he began by telling the youngsters that Michaels was in jail because she was a “bad girl,” that the children must be “brave” and that they should tell him the “bad things” she had done. Rather han reel off incidents, however, most children seemed puzzled.

To help them, Fonolleras gave the children anatomically correct dolls and silverware so they could describe their alleged abuse.

First, one child put the knife on the doll’s arm.

“Arm!”

The child agreed. “She cutted my arm.”

Then, the leg. The neck. The chest. Finally, the knife moved lower.

“Vagina!” Fonolleras exclaimed. The little girl agreed.

“Very good. That was very brave of you,” the interviewer said. “Very good.”

Frequently, the children said they bled from these wounds, although no one noticed any cuts during the time they were allegedly inflicted.

The interviews are replete with comments that did not fit and were then ignored. For example, when the investigator asked who else saw the alleged abuse--seeking names of other students--the children often said “Mommy” or named another teacher.

“The record of available interviews does not disclose that any of the children related their testimony on the alleged abuse by ‘free recall,’ ” the appeals court noted. Rather, the disclosures came in response to “extremely leading and suggestive questions” which “planted sexual information in the children’s minds.”

Still, the interviews gave prosecutors ample evidence to present to a grand jury. In November, 1985, Kelly Michaels was indicted on 235 counts of child abuse.

According to the accounts presented in court, Michaels was alleged to have committed most of the abuse during the 45-minute nap time. She was said to have secreted the children up two flights of stairs to a church choir room where she removed their clothes and hers. Naked, she played “Jingle Bells” on the piano, defecated on the floor, urinated in the mouths of the children and painted them with peanut butter, the prosecution argued.

Then she was said to have quickly dressed the children and walked them back downstairs so quietly that no one noticed their absence--just as no one heard the piano playing.

Two years after the first accusations arose, the case went to trial in Newark. Parents took the witness stand and testified about the odd behaviors of their children. They were certain their children had been molested and traumatized.

“I know my child, and I know when to believe what she is telling me,” one mother testified.

Over the objections of the defense, Eileen Treacy, a psychologist, testified that reported bed wetting, weepiness, dietary changes and acting out of sexual scenes were consistent with having been abused at school.

But the judge refused to permit a psychiatrist to testify that his examination of Michaels convinced him she was not a child abuser. The judge also refused to permit defense psychologists to interview the children.

The most effective witnesses were the children themselves. They testified from the judge’s chambers, often while sitting on his lap. The appeals court noted the difference between their hesitant statements during the 1985 interviews and their more assertive, detailed testimony during the 1987 trial.

After being “subjected to repeated, intense investigative interviews,” the children’s accounts had firmed up, the court said. “Having been visited by the prosecutor’s staff the night before their testimony in almost every instance, their testimony appeared well-prepared, rote and detached.”

The jury deliberated for 12 days and then convicted Kelly Michaels on 115 counts. In August, 1988, she was sentenced to state prison, where she could have remained until age 74.

Michaels had hit bottom. “This was worse than dying. My life and my reputation had been taken away,” she says now. “But I was convinced that eventually, eventually , people would come to their senses and that the truth would rise.”

Her family, which had stuck with her during the trial, could not afford to finance her appeal and a state-appointed lawyer concluded she had few grounds to challenge the conviction.

However, two journalists--Debbie Nathan, in a Village Voice article in 1988, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing in Harper’s magazine in 1990--suggested that Michaels had been wrongly convicted. Morton Stavis, a 74-year-old civil liberties lawyer in New York, read about the case and decided to take on the appeal pro bono.

The tide of opinion about sexual abuse cases began to shift too. In the mid-1980s, lawmakers and judges had bent courtroom rules to make it easier for children to testify about abuse, but some now began to wonder whether the rights of defendants had been sacrificed.

And some psychiatrists and psychologists also began to voice a new skepticism about mass child abuse, contending that the children’s accounts were tainted by suggestive questioning.

“I saw absolutely no evidence these children were abused,” says Richard A. Gardner, a child psychiatrist affiliated with Columbia University Medical School who represented the defense in a civil suit brought by parents against Wee Care’s insurers. “These parents were winding them up. Look at the accusations. How do you put fork or knife into a penis or anus and have no physical injury? These were preposterous fantasies believed by gullible juries.”

Last December, Morton Stavis died at age 77, just weeks after his brief had been submitted to the New Jersey appeals court. On March 26, the court handed down an 84-page opinion throwing out the conviction because, it said, the trial had been fundamentally unfair.

Later this month, Essex County prosecutors will ask the state’s highest court to reinstate the conviction. Failing that, they could retry Michaels.

“I’m convinced they didn’t make up these accusations wholesale based on an hourlong interview,” says Glenn D. Goldberg, a key prosecutor in the case. With Michaels free on bail, “the worst fears of the children have come true,” he adds.

Michaels, now 31, says she looks forward to beginning her life again. But for now, she says she wants to “bear witness to what has happened to me.”

“Once you are under arrest and accused of something like this, you are powerless, a pariah,” she says. “Someday, in time, this will be seen as an embarrassing chapter in our history, like the McCarthy Era, when innocent people could be convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.”