Testimony in Child Abuse Case Recanted

Two alleged victims in one of the nation’s biggest child molestation investigations from the 1980s took the stand Monday and tearfully said the grotesque abuse stories they told two decades ago were lies.

Instead, the two men said, accounts of molestation they described in 1984 were the result of coercion and threats by Kern County law enforcement, which apparently believed it had stumbled onto a massive set of interlocking child molestation and pornography rings in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The alleged victims recanted their childhood testimony in the opening day of a hearing to determine whether the alleged mastermind of one of the Bakersfield rings, John Stoll, was wrongly convicted.

Both said the lies they told have haunted their adult lives and made them hesitant to show love to their own children for fear it could be misinterpreted.

Victor Monge, a 27-year-old salesman, said investigators in the Stoll case made him feel that if he didn’t cooperate and testify the way they wanted, his mother, an illegal immigrant, might be deported.

Sobbing on the witness stand, he said he finally agreed to testify against Stoll because “I didn’t want anything to happen to my parents.”

The other alleged victim, Donald Grafton, a 26-year-old factory worker in Salmon, Idaho, broke down as he read a poem he had written in the seventh grade about the trauma of helping send Stoll and three other alleged members of the ring to prison. One of them was his mother, who he testified -- wrongly, he said -- had sex with him when he was 6 years old.

“My mother in prison innocently for seven years, here come the tears,” he read, crying as he did. Courtroom observers, and even court personnel hardened to tales of violence and victimization, dabbed at their eyes. Stoll, 60 and nearly bald, dressed in a jail uniform of brown and green, put his face in his hands. He has been imprisoned for 18 years.

In the mid-’80s, scores of people were investigated, and 40 were convicted and sent to prison in Bakersfield on charges 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 the 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.

The state attorney general’s office also harshly criticized the Kern County investigators for failing to, among other things, seek medical tests showing the molestations actually occurred.

Stoll, then a divorced carpenter, was arrested in 1984 and accused of running a child-abuse ring out of his rented house on Center Street.

Two of his co-defendants, Margie Grafton, Donald’s mother, and her second husband, Tim Palomo, were later released from prison.

The hearing that began Monday is in response to a petition filed by Stoll’s new attorneys, the Northern California Innocence Project in Santa Clara, which took on the case after looking at the original trial and coming to the conclusion that Stoll was innocent.

Of the original six alleged victims, five are expected to testify this week that they don’t recall ever having been molested. Their testimony is likely to last most of the week.

The sixth victim, however, presents a problem because it is Stoll’s estranged son, Jed, now 25. Jed Stoll is expected to testify that the stories he told on the witness stand were true.

Innocence Project attorneys say Jed’s insistence that he was molested doesn’t shake their confidence in their client. Jed, they say, was the youngest and the most vulnerable to the manipulations of social workers and sheriff’s deputies.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Green, in trying to show that prosecutors in 1984 were not on a witch hunt, raised questions about why the men had come forward now. She pointed out that transcripts of the original trial showed that no one was sitting at their elbows feeding them information.

She also said they seemed to have good memories when insisting they lied but couldn’t remember other things, such as what they told investigators in old police reports.

Superior Court Judge John Kelly said his ruling will focus on three issues: whether law enforcement interview techniques resulted in unreliable testimony, whether the conviction was a result of false testimony, and whether a tape recorder was used in the questioning. At least three of the former victims recall investigators using a tape recorder, but law enforcement officials deny any tapes exist.

Grafton’s poem could turn out to be a key piece of evidence, because it appears to show that he knew he lied long before Stoll’s attorneys began trying to release the convict.

An attorney for the Innocence Project, Linda Starr, asked whether Grafton had had any contact with Stoll in prison. He said he hadn’t.

Asked why, he replied, his voice cracking, “I should have apologized.”