By Nick Bryant
October 21, 2022
Ross Cheit, PhD, a professor at Brown University, spent 18 years researching the child abuse scandals of the 1980s. His subsequent book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children, demonstrates that many of the child abuse cases that have been branded as the “Satanic Panic” and discounted as a “witch-hunt narrative” actually entailed child abuse, including the McMartin case.
A pithy encapsulation of the witch-hunt narrative as it’s applied to McMartin would read as follows: At the McMartin case’s apex, it included 41 child complainants; 14 of whom participated in the preliminary hearing. The remainder of the complainants discontinued the case. The preliminary hearing lasted 18 months and the judge ultimately ruled that 7 people who worked at the McMartin Preschool should be indicted on multiple counts of child abuse. But in June of 1984, a new district attorney took over the prosecution and dropped the charges against five of the defendants.
Only Ray Buckey and his mother Peggy Buckey actually went to trial and their case involved the abuse of 11 children. Their trial lasted two years, and they were found not guilty on most of the child abuse charges. But the jury was hung on 12 counts against Ray Buckey that involved three children. Ray Buckey had a second trial in 1990 and that jury was hung on all counts. Ergo, McMartin entailed no child abuse. But the McMartin case as it relates to the witch-hunt narrative has numerous problems.
In the McMartin case, Judy Johnson of Manhattan Beach, California noticed bleeding from her son’s rectum in August of 1983. She asked her son, Matthew, about the bleeding, and he said “Mr. Ray” had put a thermometer there. The boy was examined by three doctors who concurred that he had been molested. The third doctor, Dr. Jean Simpson-Savary, a Johns Hopkins Medical School graduate, had expertise in child sexual abuse. She said the abuse had occurred within the last week, and she contacted the Manhattan Beach Police Department. However, no pictures were taken of Mathew’s injuries.
The witch-hunt narrative maintains that Judy Johnson was an unstable alcoholic who overreacted to her son’s complaint, and he was only examined by an intern. At the time of Judy Johnson’s initial allegations, she showed no signs of mental instability or overt alcoholism. By 1986, however, almost three years into the McMartin case, her mental health had deteriorated, and she became an obvious alcoholic. But the case’s initial prosecutor, Glenn Stevens, said she was very stable at the time of the complaint, even though he will eventually have a motive for declaring that she is crazy.
The Manhattan Beach Police Department arrested Ray Buckey on September 7th 1983, but he was quickly released. The MBPD chief then sent out letters to all of the parents who had children enrolled at McMartin, inquiring if they suspected that their children had been abused. Eight families responded to the letter, because they suspected that their children had been abused; several other respondents are listed as possible.
After the MBPD sent a letter to the McMartin parents, Tanya Mergili was the first child to relay specifics about Ray Buckey’s abuse, which included being tied up. She told her parents about the abuse and then she was examined by a physician at UCLA whose letter to the MBPD states that Tanya’s account of her abuse is credible.
Sara Barton was the next child to come forward to her parents. She had been in Ray Buckey’s class and provided specifics about his sexual abuse. According to her mother, she had vaginitis and rectal pain until she left the McMartin Preschool and went to kindergarten. Though Sara provided a number of specifics, her parents didn’t want to subject her to a formal police interview.
Sally Gregg is the next child to say “Ray-Ray” abused her. There isn’t an indication that Sally’s parents brought her to the police station, but the MBPD wrote a report on her abuse.
Kathy Wilcox, whose child attended McMartin, relayed to the police that their daughter Karen said that “Ray” would take girls to the bathroom and molest them, and Sally Gregg was one of those girls.
Mary Gordon was the next victim who came forward because of the MBPD September letter. Shortly after receiving the letter, Mary accompanied her family on a trip. But when the family returned from their trip, Mary gave an interview to the MBPD, discussing how she was molested by Ray Buckey. The interviewing officers felt that her statements were strongly indicative of being molested.
Kathy Ingram was the fifth victim who came forward because of the MBPD September letter. After receiving the letter, Kathy’s mother was convinced that her daughter hadn’t been molested at McMartin. But shortly thereafter, 3-year-old Valerie Van Holden and her brother Bobby were interviewed at the police station. The police found the children to be unruly, but Valerie said that she had been molested by Ray Buckey and also said that Kathy Ingram had been molested too. The MBPD informed Kathy Ingram’s mother about Valerie Van Holden’s disclosure, and Kathy told her mother that she, too, had been molested by Ray Buckey.
The MBPD received 3 additional responses to the September letter in which children had told their parents that they had been molested at McMartin. Consequently, at least 8 families whose children attended McMartin came forward with allegations or indications of sexual abuse.
The parents of the children found that MBPD detective Jane Hoag was too abrasive when questioning the children. So in October of 1983, the Los Angeles District Attorney requested the assistance of the Children's Institute International (CII), a Los Angeles-based abuse therapy clinic run by Kee MacFarlane.
CII had interviewed victims of abuse before, but it had never interviewed multiple victims whose abuse stemmed from the same institution or person. The witch-hunt narrative ascribes utter incompetence to CII. When CII started interviewing the children, the MBPD had 10 definite respondents to the September letter, and 9 probable or potential respondents. The family of at least one child who told his parents that he was abused by Ray Buckey had moved to Hawaii.
But only four of those children would be involved in the criminal cases.
The CII interviews started on November 1st 1983. Kee McFarlane interviewed 15 children, but only 3 became involved in the criminal case—Mary Gordon, Kathy Ingram, and Trisha Walter who were the 8th, 9th, and 11th interviews. The remainder of the 15 children said nothing incriminating or very little that was incriminating.
But McFarlane concluded that virtually all of the children had been abused. At the end of November, for all intents and purposes McMartin was, in actuality, a small case, but CII concluded it was a very large case, and the quality of the interviews began deteriorating, because the CII staff believed that all of the children interviewed in December were victims of abuse at McMartin.
The questioning tactics of CII staff also became much more aggressive and included peer pressure statements like “all the other kids.” McFarlane told one child that he was a “scaredy cat,” because he didn’t say he was abused. As the quality of the interviews deteriorated, one child said that the Preschool had a trap door that opened to a pit of alligators. A core tenet of the witch-hunt narrative is that the CII planted memories in all of the children, but the grand irony of McMartin being the prototypical “Satanic Panic” case is that none of the children who actually went to trial said anything about the devil, Satan, or ritual abuse.
A fountainhead of the witch-hunt narrative is Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, written by Debbie Nathan and Michael R. Snedeker. They attack Tanya Mergili’s credibility on her CII videotaped interview by writing that Kee McFarlane led her to say “bad” in response to Ray Buckey, but Tanya said “bad” before McFarlane even mentioned the word. So, again, the witch-hunt narrative comes up short on veracity.
Though the December interviews did not generate new victims, the CII staff ignored the children who said they weren’t abused and concluded that 5 female teachers at McMartin and Virginia Martin were also guilty of sexual abuse. CII had obviously jumped the tracks of reality.
As the CII interviews continued through April of 1984, they became increasingly divergent from the initial allegations that were centered on Ray Buckey. The children discussed ritual abuse, pornography, being transported to different locations, etc.
Though the quality of the CII interviews had deteriorated in December, the parents of Breanna Chapman came forward in January. Breanna’s parents had been staunch supporters of McMartin, and they didn’t remove their child from McMartin despite the allegations of sexual abuse. But Breanna’s mother had discovered signs that her daughter had been molested, and her daughter told her that “Ray” had spit in her face and hurt her. A physician, Dr. Myron Mitzenmacher, would conclude that Breanna had been molested. Though Breanna’s mother testified at the grand jury, the witch-hunt narrative has excluded Breanna’s allegations of sexual abuse. Perhaps because the defense in the first trial opted not to question her.
The medical examinations conducted by the physicians who worked at CII, Drs. Astrid Heger and Bruce Woodling, unequivocally over diagnosed sexual abuse in the children who attended McMartin.
Dr. Adstrid Heger conducted a majority of the medical examinations at CII. The forensics of identifying child sexual abuse were in a nascent state at the onset of the McMartin case. The medical profession had yet to realize that the signs of abuse are also found in nonabused children. But all of the examinations shouldn’t be outright dismissed, and the witch-hunt narrative’s account of Matthew Johnson’s abuse, the first McMartin student to say that he was abused, also jumps the tracks of reality. Nathan and Snedeker cite a study by Erickson et al, “Behavior Patterns of Child Molesters,” and they say that the Erickson et al study posits that Matthew Johnson should be “maimed or killed” because of the abuse he described. However, the Erickson et al paper makes no mention of “maimed or killed.” The defense’s expert witness even believed that Mathew Johnson’s injuries were consistent with abuse.
The brutal preliminary hearing lasted 17 months; at the onset there were 41 children who were complainants, and at its conclusion there were only 14. After the preliminary hearing, the charges against Virginia McMartin and the five teachers were dropped by Ira Reiner, the new Los Angeles County district attorney. But the charges against Ray Buckey and his mother were not dropped.
The first trial started on July 13, 1987. The prosecution ultimately went forward with 11 children. A majority of the jurors found that the most relevant evidence against Ray Buckey and his mother came from Sally Gregg, Trisha Walters, and Allison Brown.
Sally testified at the preliminary hearing and the first trial. She was the only September respondent who testified at the first trial, but she wasn’t among the initial children interviewed by CII, which interviewed her in January of 1984, and she was examined by Dr. Heger two months later in March. Two of prosecution’s expert witnesses, who were physicians, testified that the pictures of Sally Gregg’s anal scars were consistent with sexual abuse, but the defense expert, Dr. David Paul, who had flown in from the UK, testified that the child had a perfectly normal anus. He had unusual methods in the examination of children: he inserted his finger in their vagina as a “measurement.” The witch-hunt narrative does not think his examination techniques should be scrutinized.
Among the children who actually made it to trial, Trisha Walters was the first to be interviewed by CII on November 22nd 1983. At the first trial, Drs. Heger and Woodley reported that Trisha had several lacerations of the hymen that had become scars, but there were no pictures to back up her testimony. Dr. Paul would concede that if the testimony by Drs. Heger and Woodley were truthful, the lacerations were an indication of abuse.
Allison Brown, involved in both trials, was interviewed by CII on March 13th 1983. She suffered from recurrent nightmares that someone was breaking into the house at night, and her father actually nailed her bedroom window shut to ameliorate her anxiety. Allison had scarring on her vulva, and Dr. Heger testified “to a medical certainty” that the scarring was not self-inflicted. Dr. Paul testified that he could not discern scarring. The witch-hunt narrative categorically accepts Dr. Paul’s testimony.
Some of the medical evidence was flimsy, but there was medical evidence that would be germane today. The witch-hunt narrative denies that any of the medical evidence indicates signs of abuse, even though five of the September respondents showed signs of sexual abuse before CII was called into the case. However, CII’s over diagnosis of sexual abuse significantly undermined the prosecution’s case.
In January of 1990, the jury delivered its verdict. The jury voted to acquit Ray Buckey and his mother on 52 charges. The jury could not reach a verdict on 12 counts against Ray Buckey and a conspiracy charge against his mother. At the press conference, 7 jurors said that they believed sexual abuse had occurred at McMartin, but the CII tapes planted seeds of doubt.
In the second trial that started on May 7, 1990, Ray Buckey was retried on 6 of the 12 counts in which the first trial could not reach a definitive conclusion. Ray Buckey’s second trial resulted in a hung jury.
Just beneath the exterior of the witch-hunt narrative is the fact that Ray Buckey is a strange and troubled man. He had previously garnered complaints of lewd and lascivious behavior, because he had exposed himself in public. Trisha Walter’s mother said she had seen kids sitting on Ray Buckey’s lap as he was reading a Playboy.
An article by the Los Angeles Times that became woven into the witch-hunt narrative reported that Ray Buckey couldn’t have molested the children he was accused of, because he wasn’t working at the McMartin Preschool when many of the molestations occurred. However, the prosecutors had extensive evidence that placed Ray Buckey at the preschool during the molestations. The witch-hunt narrative as it is related by Nathan and Snedeker maintains that Ray Buckey took the job at McMartin because he was attempting to figure out his future.
The first prosecutor of the case, Glenn Stevens and the Los Angeles District Attorney failed the children in a variety of ways:
Assistant district attorney, Glenn Stevens, withdrew from the case and began giving extensive interviews to Abby Mann and Myra Mann who wrote the HBO’s Indictment, which makes him out to be a hero, because he saw through the witch-hunt narrative and discontinued the case. Although Stevens thought Ray Buckey was guilty, he toasted the acquittal of all the defendants with the Manns.
The witch-hunt narrative was trumpeted by all of the major media as the McMartin trials returned acquittals. Unfortunately, the plight of all children who were molested by Ray Buckey has been granted zero ontology, so they will continue to struggle with their sexual abuse and the witch-hunt narrative will spare them no quarter.
I realize that some children said tunnels were connected to the McMartin Preschool, and archeologist Gary Stickel, PhD, of UCLA, did indeed find evidence of tunnels that were connected to the Preschool. However, because of incompetence of CII and the LA District Attorney’s office, we will probably never know the answers to the other allegations that have surfaced about McMartin.
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