New Hearing Is Granted in Child Abuse Conviction

A man who has spent the last 18 years in a Central Valley prison for crimes he says he didn’t commit has won a new hearing at which some of his alleged molestation victims are expected to testify that they were manipulated and bullied into telling false stories.

Kern County Superior Court Judge John Kelly has set a Jan. 12 date for a hearing to examine John Stoll’s claims that he was wrongly convicted of child molestation as part of what critics call the Bakersfield witch hunt cases.

In the mid-1980s, scores of people were investigated and 40 were convicted and sent to prison on charges that they had subjected children to bizarre sexual rituals. It was one of the first and most sweeping prosecutions of alleged child molestation rings in the country at that time, predating the McMartin prosecution in Manhattan Beach.

In recent years, however, at least 18 Bakersfield defendants have been released after appeals court judges found errors, including prosecutorial misconduct and unreliable techniques in the questioning of the alleged child victims.

Of all those convicted in similar cases across the nation, Stoll is believed to be the longest held.

“John is so thrilled,” said Jill Kent, an attorney for the Northern California Innocence Project, which has taken up his case. “This is the happiest he’s been in 18 years.

“We finally have a chance to get the truth out that there was a huge miscarriage of justice in this case.”

Prosecutor Lisa Green said she had no comment on the judge’s decision to order a hearing. Told the defense was celebrating the ruling, Green said, “Good for them.”

Stoll, now 60, was arrested in 1984 and accused of being part of a sex-abuse ring operating out of his rented house on Center Street in Bakersfield. The four-person ring was accused of abusing seven boys from the neighborhood, including Stoll’s own son, Jed.

John Stoll, a carpenter, was divorced but had visitation rights with his son at the time. Court records show he and his ex-wife had an acrimonious relationship. Each complained about the parental styles of the other.

In an attempt to show that the case had been trumped up by a vengeful ex-wife and incompetent child-welfare workers, defense attorneys said there was no physical evidence to prove anything improper had happened.

None of the alleged victims was given a medical examination to verify molestation. None of the child pornography the ring was supposedly filming was ever found.

The defense said the welfare workers had been overzealous true believers who thought they had stumbled onto a huge underground child-abuse network operating in Bakersfield. To win convictions, the defense said, they bullied the children into making up false stories.

The jury convicted the defendants on 36 counts of lewd and lascivious conduct. Two were released after an appeals court ruled that the trial judge had erred by refusing to allow the defense to introduce psychological tests showing they didn’t fit the profile of child predators. Stoll recalls taking and passing a similar test, but his attorney never tried to introduce it.

At the upcoming hearing, the defense is pinning its hopes on several of the alleged victims, who are now adults. Four of the six involved in Stoll’s case now say he never touched them. They testified that he did, they say, only because the welfare workers and Sheriff’s Department cajoled, bullied and threatened them.

One said he had been led to believe that if he didn’t cooperate, his mother, an illegal immigrant, would be deported. Others feared that they would be taken from their parents.

In his six-page ruling, Kelly said Stoll’s attorneys had presented enough evidence to warrant a hearing on three questions: Were the child witnesses subjected to improper questioning techniques? Did the witnesses testify falsely? And did the prosecution fail to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense in the form of tape-recordings of the interviews?

Three of the alleged victims say they remember that a tape recorder was used in their interviews, but the prosecution said there were no tapes.

The issue of the tape recordings could be crucial. In another case of an alleged Bakersfield sex-abuse ring in which the prosecution said there were no tape recordings, a tape turned up in a cardboard box 11 years later. After listening to it, Kelly concluded that the questions had been improperly leading.

The hearing could provide an extraordinary replay of events, now almost 20 years in the past. Stoll’s attorney said the alleged victims probably will testify. Several told The Times they had been haunted for years by the knowledge that their testimony had helped convict Stoll, who they now believe was innocent.

“These kids are finally going to have a chance to straighten things out,” Kent said.

The defense faces a hurdle, however, because Stoll’s son, Jed, 25, has told the prosecution that he stands by his original testimony that his father molested him. Defense experts say Jed Stoll might have come to believe he had been molested, even if he had not been. At 6, he was the youngest of the alleged victims and his mother was hostile to John Stoll. Nevertheless, Jed Stoll’s testimony will be key, because 10 of the counts against his father involve Jed.

“Nobody’s trying to blame him for what he said or believes,” Kent said. “He’s as much a victim as John.”