The Victims Can’t Be Counted

Before that other trial of the century came along, this was the trial of the century.

For size, for price, for outrage and outrageousness, you just couldn’t beat the McMartin Pre-School case. Seven years in the making (and unmaking), 208 counts of child molestation right out of the pedophile’s encyclopedia, seven defendants, 41 children--it was the Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza of criminal cases.

On and on, through L.A.’s Olympic summer of 1984, McMartin busted the tape with records of its own: L.A.’s longest preliminary hearing (a year and a half), its priciest prosecution ($13 million and change). McMartin would chew up seven years, six judges, 17 lawyers.

It was unimaginable that within the bright rooms, behind the kindly faces, dark things happened at the Manhattan Beach preschool. A secret cave for sexual games (investigators couldn’t find it). Rabbits butchered on a church altar (no traces of blood turned up). Airplane rides for in-flight molestations (no records were found). Strangers molesting children (almost absurdly, children picked photos of actor Chuck Norris and city Controller James K. Hahn).

As O.J. Simpson’s trial would, McMartin sundered friendships and family table talk. Did they do it, or didn’t they? Did the kids make it up? Did the investigators encourage them?

There were no convictions. None. Five of the seven defendants didn’t even go to trial. Of the two who did, Ray Buckey, the only man among the defendants, had a hung jury in his first trial. He had a hung jury in his second trial. There was no third trial.

The other defendant who went to trial was his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, who died over the weekend--daughter of one defendant, mother of another and a defendant herself.

No one won in this case: not the children, not successive district attorneys, not the late Peggy McMartin Buckey, in spite of her acquittal. She spent her life savings on attorneys. One of them won a slander case against one of her accusers. She got a dollar.

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In 1983, the year a mother called Manhattan Beach police to say her 2-year-old son had been molested at his preschool, the baby boomers were well into their own childbearing and a pediocracy was emerging, more child-focused than even the boomers’ parents had been.

Children were pure. One didn’t drink or swear around them. One certainly didn’t spank them. And the unspeakable act of molestation--children could not lie about such things. They could not make such things up.

Of course children lie. I lied. We all lied. We lied about not eating cookies even as we had tollhouse on our breath. But we also lied for the pleasure of creating our own reality--our imaginary friend, our dad’s superhero strength, our magic car.

That was called imagination, and it was an enchanting element of being a child, like believing that Santa was real and your mom could fly. If it were not part of childhood, the author of the Harry Potter books would still be a welfare mom.

But McMartin was different. The animal sacrifices could have come from some horror movie, but games like naked movie star, and naked cowboys and Indians--how could they make this up?

I was new to The Times’ newsroom, but not to molestation stories. Three years before, I’d written about a man wrongly convicted of molesting two boys. The boys had made up the story to get out of being punished. The parents went to the police, the police went to court, the man went to prison.

His conviction was expunged after the boys confessed to making it up. It turned out that an investigator had kept questioning the boys until she got the answer she wanted, and then taped over what didn’t help the case.

Call it manipulation or zeal, doing the wrong things for the right reasons can be as corrosive as ignoring the problem itself and hurting the very children we seek to help. When perspective gets lost, so does the truth. We see it in the drug wars, the zero-tolerance policies that expel a Texas girl for having Advil, a West Virginia boy for giving a cough drop to a friend, but seem not to discourage cocaine smugglers from trying to use a submarine to get their goods to market.

The victims of McMartin Syndrome cannot be counted:

The preschool students themselves, damaged perhaps by sexual abuse and surely by the prosecuting of it. Americans from the San Joaquin Valley to small-town Tennessee, caught up in a decade of McMartin copycat witch hunts. Legitimate victims of abuse whose less flamboyant truths were lost in the backwash of skepticism about any such childhood horrors.

And McMartin is still making victims. Every weeping child who wasn’t even born in 1983, who can’t get a hug from a teacher who is too afraid of being accused of molestation, is one more victim of the McMartin Pre-School case.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com