Revisiting the McMartin Case : ‘Indictment,’ a Passionate, Highly Opinionated Retelling of the Preschool Sex Abuse Scandal, Hits Hard at TV News Overkill

Hysteria is no stranger to the United States, witness its ongoing, TV-driven paranoia over violent crime, its internment of its own Japanese citizens in the 1940s and its bomb shelter mania and Red-scare witch hunts of the early Cold War.

In that regard, now comes “Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” HBO’s frothing, highly opinionated account of the case that brought the public’s concern about sexual abuse of kids to a churning, overflowing boil that engulfed and threatened to vaporize seven criminal defendants.

Of course they were guilty. How could they not have been guilty? Their accusers were children--innocent, guileless, wounded tykes who recounted in bizarre, agonizing detail how they were touched and tormented by these adult . . . monsters, one of whom, Ray Buckey, admitted even to not always wearing underwear around the kids. Yeah, that’s right, and there was something weird about his owlish, schoolboy looks, too, and the way he got his jollies from dirty pictures and was no Romeo with women. There it is, open and shut.

The children? Of course they were telling the truth. Children don’t lie about such things. Not this many children at the same school.

So went the common wisdom that few initially questioned as McMartin hysteria soared, but which “Indictment” obliterates, taking no prisoners via forceful direction by Mick Jackson and a script by Abby and Myra Mann that is passionately friendly to the defendants.

Running just over two hours, “Indictment” is something worthwhile to build an evening around. With arresting incisiveness, and with hot-wired James Woods as crafty defense attorney Danny Davis and Mercedes Ruehl as obsessed prosecutor Lael Rubin, it depicts a chunk of ugly history whose lesson about lynch mob psychology--that jumping to conclusions can equal leaping into a noose--by now should have been learned by everyone.

But hasn’t.

For example: “Terrorism Reaches the Southland!” screamed a recent local news headline on TV. What horror. What hokum.

The “terrorism” in the tease referred to Steven Garrett Colbern, a former Oxnard resident whom authorities were seeking to quiz about his alleged link to Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy J. McVeigh. Given McVeigh’s widely presumed guilt and Colbern’s own reputed love of firearms and loathing of feds, it was obvious to some that the former Californian was McVeigh’s sought-after missing cohort in the April 19 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. So get a rope, find a tree.

But surprise! Colbern was arrested in Arizona on May 12, yet was ordered to stand trial only on charges of resisting arrest and being a fugitive with a firearm. As of this writing, there’s been no hint of evidence tying him to the bombing. So much for this episode of Southland-linked terrorism.

Whatever Colbern’s fate, his recent brush with notoriety’s stinging laser reaffirms the amnesia afflicting many in the media regarding their past missteps. With memories as blank as erased computer files, they’re still rushing to crime scenes, still rushing to do their ad-libbed live stand-ups, still rushing to judgment in the blistering heat of the moment.

Long forgotten is the message of McMartin, the infamous case in which the staff and well-liked owner of a family-operated Manhattan Beach nursery school were widely presumed guilty after being accused by children and their parents of molesting hundreds of these preschoolers, exposing them to horrific satanic rituals and frightening them into silence by savagely killing and mutilating animals. The charges yielded no convictions.

“Indictment” preaches against the injustice of prejudging. Those initially accused include the school’s feisty old owner, Virginia McMartin (Sada Thompson); her daughter, Peggy Buckey McMartin (Shirley Knight), and her two grown grandchildren, Peggy Ann Buckey (Alison Elliot) and Ray Buckey (“E.T.” star Henry Thomas).

Although never proved, the children’s claims create indelible images. So even when the criminal charges ultimately fall away in a case that creeps on for nearly seven years, the stigma remains. Would you want Ray Buckey taking care of your kid?

This was not a subtle case; “Indictment” is not a subtle movie. After watching it, you feel like the horse that Ray Buckey is accused of beating to death. The movie’s McMartin/Buckey clan is nearly angelic, its lead prosecutor Rubin so driven to secure career-boosting convictions that she loses perspective and shoves aside legal ethics.

Meanwhile, the real Davis may not enjoy seeing himself as a high-priced shiny suit (the highly revved Wood here mimics his scum defender/idealist of “True Believer”). But Davis does turn out to be the story’s street-fighter hero as Ray Buckey’s attorney, with support from the defendants and whistle-blowing Deputy Dist. Atty. Glenn Stevens (Joe Urla), who resigns after leaking his strong doubts about the case to a newspaper reporter. Although the real Stevens was the subject of great controversy, his motives here are pure.

The villains are the media, the D.A.’s office and Kee MacFarlane (Lolita Davidovich), the unlicensed therapist/social worker who, in her glazed-over, misguided zeal, uses anatomically correct dolls to manipulate children into reciting sexual abuse horrors on videotape, tales that they earlier denied.

MacFarlane’s romance with Wayne Satz (Mark Blum), the KABC-TV Channel 7 reporter who led the early rumor-fueled media charge against the defendants, is correctly treated here as outrageous collusion. But it’s MacFarlane’s courtroom war with Davis (some of which is greatly overblown here) that forms the looping signature of this anti-prosecution tract, signifying the forces of darkness getting creamed by the forces of light.

The movie’s own light is filtered. Whatever the full truth of the McMartin debacle, you don’t learn it from “Indictment,” which delivers on a skewer the heads of a few fanatical parents whose irrationality is blatant. Most prominent is Judy Johnson, the erratic boozer whose charge in 1983 that Ray Buckey sodomized her 2 1/2-year-old son toggled the McMartin case into existence. She later claimed her dog had been sexually molested.

But “Indictment” offers no rationale for the many upstanding parents, persons hardly known as ranting zealots, who also sincerely believed that their kids had been sexually abused and terrorized under the care of their community’s respected preschool. In effect, “Indictment” tries these parents in absentia. Medical evidence that might have persuaded them of the defendants’ guilt is also all but omitted from the movie, which, like Abby Mann’s acutely biased and revisionist 1985 docudrama, “The Atlanta Child Murders,” deploys selective trial testimony in the cause of the defense.

What is known, and what “Indictment” conveys most effectively, is that sensational, even slanted media coverage of McMartin by Satz and others, especially in its initial stages, helped whip the public into a frenzy, creating a climate that drove the district attorney’s office to stubbornly cling to a case it apparently knew was deeply flawed and was tied to evidence in part questionable, in part unbelievable.

Satz, the movie’s evil satan, died of heart failure in 1992. His flip dismissal here as a facile, ruthless predator (whom Davis glibly mislabels “the Geraldo of local news”) is far from the truth. More than just aggressive, Satz was a serious, talented investigative reporter whose journalistic low unfortunately was the McMartin case and the conflict of interest he hid by having a secret fling with MacFarlane. He erred. Yet a scene in “Indictment” showing fellow reporters sanctimoniously berating Satz as if he were a tabloid shark, with one blasting him as “the reason people hate the press,” rings as false as some of the wildest charges that were made against the McMartin defendants.

Charges were later dropped against five of the seven. Subsequently, Ray Buckey and his mother were acquitted in 1990 of 40 counts of molestation, and when he was later retried on eight additional counts, a mistrial was declared after the jury deadlocked. All told, Ray Buckey spent more than five years in jail without bail.

Some believe that a similar fate may await O.J. Simpson should he be retried if his present murder trial ends in a hung jury. The two cases are hardly comparable, however, one reason being that the evidence is far greater and more persuasive against Simpson than it was against Buckey, who made himself a fat target merely by being unconventional.

“When you’re accused of child molesting,” Davis tells him, “everything is a crime.” If Buckey is the man “Indictment” says he is, the crime was against him.

* “Indictment: The McMartin Trial” airs at 8 tonight on HBO.