McMartin: Hearing Is Believing

See previous post for sources not cited here.

The purpose of a preliminary hearing is to determine whether sufficient evidence exists to bring a defendant to trial. Usually, you’d expect these to take a few hours, maybe a day. The prelim of the O.J. Simpson murder case, dubbed by the press ‘The Crime of the Century,‘ took about a week.

By contrast, the preliminary hearing of the McMartin case began on 17 August 1984, and concluded on 9 January 1986.

True, the case had some complexities in that there were seven defendants, each with their own attorneys, three different prosecutors, and a parade of forensic and eyewitnesses. Still, you’d have to think that the prosecution had enough evidence to go to trial. They had the videotaped interviews with Kee MacFarlane’s 394 victims. Five of the children would also take the stand. In addition to MacFarlane’s expert testimony, there was also Dr. Astrid Heger’s examinations.

Moreover, the prosecution had received assistance from a highly respected psychiatrist, Dr. Roland Summit, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He coined the term Child Abuse Accommodation Syndrome (CAAS) in a 1983 paper for the scholarly journal Child Abuse and Neglect. CAAS, simply put, was a five-stage process in which victims of childhood sex abuse come to deny their encounters with adults: (1) secrecy; (2) helplessness; (3) entrapment and accommodation; (4) delayed, unconvincing disclosure; and (5) retraction. In essence, he argued that the victims of sex abuse have every reason to keep it secret and to publicly deny it. (This would play a role later on when MacFarlane explained her interviewing technique with defense attorneys.)

The examinations and cross-examinations took quite some time, simply because of the volume of the evidence. There was also another matter: the decision on whether or not to allow sixteen additional child witnesses to testify on closed-circuit television.

Most important, the defense would not passively stipulate the evidence, but challenged it at every turn. In effect, the preliminary hearing took on more the tone of an actual trial, as defense attorneys began to sense that the prosecution’s evidence was nowhere as strong as first believed. They immediately noted critical methodological flaws in the examinations by MacFarlane and Dr. Heger. They also pointed out the lack of key evidence. First of all, no one could produce a single photograph or movie clip of a naked game, despite the fact that by the prosecution’s own account thousands of them were taken. And with all of the activity supposedly happening either in or via these secret underground tunnels, no one has shown that they even existed.

The tunnels became a big issue as the hearing progressed. Sometime in the last week of February 1985, CII therapist Martha Cockriel told the LA Sheriff’s office that there was a secret room in the tunnel. One kid described the room as “totally dark but could be lit with red lights….Everyone, students and teachers alike, went there.” Another former student said that he or she “…didn’t like Ray’s secret room because it was dirty….No good things happened there.” One more kid told deputies, “…devil stuff went on. They also took naked pictures and molested kids in that room.”

Determined to prove the existence of the tunnels, parents began digging around the McMartin site on March 4. A police check on license plates indicated the presence of Bob Currie (his wife’s car was parked nearby). Two weeks later, Currie led an expedition of forty-plus parents at the site. One person, digging near Ray Buckey’s room, found a tortoise shell buried two feet under the ground. (The kids said that turtles were among the animals frequently tortured and killed).

Despite the parents’ belief that the tortoise shell proved the existence of a satanic ring at McMartin, DA Ira Reiner realized that their amateur search could render real evidence meaningless. On March 20, prosecutors arranged for Scientific Resource Surveys (SRS), a reputable archeological firm, to do a proper dig. SRS found no evidence of tunnels and tortured animals. Instead, they found massive evidence of trash pits which included butchered animal bones and bottles dating from 1890-1940.

Despite the improbability of the tunnels‘ existence, and highly problematic prosecution evidence, Judge Aviva Bobb nevertheless bound all seven defendants for trial. But Reiner, who worried about the weakness of the evidence against five of the defendants, dropped the charges against all except for Peggy and Ray Buckey.

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Update 12/31/10:  Check out the New Year's Eve cyberbash over at Boxer's Place.  Party ends at 3:00am EST 1/1/11.