False Witnesses Find a Believing Audience Once Again

Isn’t there some rule about “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”?

Look at a map of Orange County, Calif. See that spot positively rosy with embarrassment? That’s Garden Grove, with more than enough shame to spread around.

There’s plenty for Yolanda, Catili and Aurora. They were 11 years old one fine afternoon last May, and they didn’t feel like coming straight home from school, as they’d been told to.

So they didn’t. And instead of taking their lumps when they got caught, they lied to save their little butts. Not a little lie, either, but a whopper. They swore to their folks and then to the cops that a man attacked two of them. And because of the lies, a blameless man spent eight months in jail.

And there’s shame to spare for Garden Grove’s cops. First, they were evidently so eager to make a bust that they drove one girl past the innocent man as he stood on the sidewalk. They showed her his picture. And when she said, “Yeah, that’s the guy,” she got her friends to look at the picture and put their heads together -- which the cops shouldn’t have allowed -- and the other two girls agreed, “That’s him.”

Now, we find this wasn’t just a case of nailing the wrong guy -- there was no crime to begin with, as the girls confessed last week.

To recap: First, the police were so gung-ho or gullible that they couldn’t see -- or didn’t want to see -- the holes in a story cooked up by some 11-year-olds.

And now they’re so embarrassed at being outwitted by the wily 11-year-old criminal masterminds that they stormed into the girls’ schools last week, handcuffed all three and hauled them off in squad cars, on suspicion of conspiracy. Like that’ll make things all right.

The innocent man, a homeless 36-year-old fellow named Eric Nordmark, is finally out of jail.

When Nordmark heard that police were threatening to arrest one girl’s mother for not telling the cops right away that her daughter was lying, he said no one should be prosecuted for not turning in her own kid.

A Garden Grove police spokesman harrumphed that Nordmark’s comment is “clearly an attempt to put the police in an unfavorable light.”

Maybe. But he didn’t need to try very hard to do that, did he?

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It really is disheartening to realize that a species as supposedly inventive as ours can’t seem to come up with new ways of being stupid.

Some girls come home late from school. They don’t want to get in trouble, so they concoct a poor-little-me story. Kids do that every day, but rarely with the consequences of this one.

Bad as this case turned out, it isn’t the worst. Aurora, Catili and Yolanda weren’t even born in 1987 when a 15-year-old upstate New York cheerleader named Tawana Brawley missed school and didn’t come home for four days. When she did turn up, she was smeared in feces and racist scrawls. Six white men -- one with a badge -- had raped and sodomized her, she said.

Bill Cosby put up a reward, and Mike Tyson offered her a scholarship. But tests showed she hadn’t been raped. She wouldn’t testify. A grand jury concluded it was a hoax: She’d been grounded, had sneaked off anyway to visit her boyfriend and made up the rape tale to keep from getting punished.

Something like that happened even before then, right in Orange County.

An Anaheim man was found guilty of molesting two neighbor boys. One was a rather precocious 9-year-old who’d been known to page through smut magazines. The other was his docile 8-year-old friend.

The 9-year-old was cruising for a spanking when he evidently told his mother, “Wait, you won’t hit me when you hear what happened.” And he spun a story of afternoons in the neighbor’s house, of masturbation and urination and swinging naked from chandeliers.

The younger boy denied it all at first, but the police investigator kept questioning and questioning until she got the answers she wanted, and taped over what didn’t help the case.

Not until the neighbor was sent off to prison did the 8-year-old confess. Like Nordmark, the Anaheim man was freed. And as Nordmark will probably do, this man sued police.

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In the 1980s, Los Angeles and the nation were put through seven years of judicial hell known as the McMartin Pre-School molestation case. It was the Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza of prosecutions: seven defendants, 208 criminal counts, 41 children -- no convictions.

From an accusation by a dipso mother -- who also said her dog had been sodomized -- the children were coaxed and led by adults into never-substantiated accounts of a secret sex cave, of slaughtered animals, of sex on airplanes and molestations by strangers (pointing out photographs of actor Chuck Norris and future mayor Jim Hahn).

It sounds a bit ridiculous now, but it was explosive, dangerous stuff then. Psychologists have scrutinized the McMartin case ever since, analyzing how little children can be persuaded to make such false statements -- to please the grown-ups, to get their approval and to get it all over with.

All of us can lie. In children, we call it “imagination,” and delight in their stories of Santa Claus and Harry Potter. And we are guilty of smudging the bright line of truth when we tell kids to say to whoever’s calling on the phone -- the boss, the telemarketer -- that we’re not home, even as we’re sitting right there.

How many children’s true accounts of sexual abuse have not been believed? Too many. How many children’s false accounts of sexual abuse have been believed? Again, too many.

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There’s a bio-historical theory that much of the witchcraft hysteria of the past -- including the rampages in Salem, Mass. -- was brought on by food poisoning from a common fungus on rye grain that produces a natural form of LSD.

No one can blame rye bread this time, but just watch: Some people in Garden Grove will be blaming everything from television and music to sex education classes.

Everything but themselves.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. Her previous columns can be read at latimes.com/morrison.