Dale Akiki: The Satanic Ritual Abuse Case at Faith Chapel

The Dale Akiki case was a San Diego child sexual abuse prosecution in which a developmentally distinctive church nursery volunteer was charged in 1991 with 35 counts of satanic ritual abuse, held without bail for roughly 30 months, and acquitted on every count in November 1993 after a seven-and-a-half-month trial. A grand jury later concluded that therapists and parents had coached the young accusers, the district attorney who brought the case lost his job, and San Diego County paid more than $2 million to settle Akiki’s civil suit.¹

Who Dale Akiki Was

Akiki was born with Noonan syndrome, a genetic disorder that gave him drooping eyelids, a concave chest, club feet, wide low-set ears, and an enlarged head from hydrocephalus. His measured IQ was 89 to 93.² He worked at a Navy supply depot and, with his wife Sharon, volunteered as a Sunday sitter in the nursery at Faith Chapel, an evangelical church in Spring Valley, California. The couple looked after children roughly three to five years old from about April 1988 to April 1989.³

His appearance mattered to what followed. Several parents at the church had objected to him supervising preschoolers because of how he looked, and some children were reportedly frightened by his features before any allegations surfaced.²

How the Allegations Escalated

The first claim was small. In August 1989 a four-year-old girl told her mother Akiki had exposed himself during a timeout. On videotape the child repeatedly denied any abuse, then repeated the claim after prompting by her mother and a therapist.²

Over the following months, nine children came forward with accounts that grew steadily more extreme. They said Akiki had slaughtered live animals in front of them, including a rabbit, a giraffe, and an elephant, and made the children drink the blood. They said they had been dunked in toilets, subjected to rituals involving urine and feces, threatened with guns and knives, and warned they would be killed if they told. One child accused him of murdering a baby.⁴ Some said he had driven them to other locations, though he did not have a driver’s license.⁵

Arrest and 30 Months Without Bail

Akiki was arrested in May 1991 as he got off a bus. Bail was denied five times, and he sat in San Diego County Jail for about 30 months before his trial ended.² His wife Sharon and another nursery worker were accused of conspiring in the abuse but were never charged.⁶

One procedural change helped keep the case moving. California’s Proposition 115, passed in 1990, allowed hearsay at preliminary hearings, so prosecutors could present the children’s claims without putting the children on the stand to be cross-examined. Public defender Kathleen Coyne argued that cross-examination at that stage would have exposed the problems in the testimony and stopped the case from ever reaching trial.²

The Trial and Acquittal

The trial in San Diego Superior Court ran seven and a half months and heard nearly 170 witnesses, the longest trial in the county’s history at the time. Deputy District Attorney Mary Avery led the prosecution under District Attorney Ed Miller; Kathleen Coyne and Susan Clemens represented Akiki.⁷

The case rested almost entirely on the nine children, who had been three to five years old at the time of the alleged abuse. No physical evidence was produced. Deputy District Attorney John Williams stabbed a toy bunny with a toy knife in court to illustrate the alleged animal sacrifices.² The prosecution’s expert on trauma was San Francisco psychiatrist Lenore Terr, whose work the therapists in the case admitted they had leaned on.

Two of the prosecution’s own witnesses undercut its theory. Kenneth Lanning, the FBI’s leading authority on child abuse, testified that after ten years of study he had found no evidence that satanic ritual abuse exists. Psychiatrist Park Dietz conceded on cross that he knew of no case anywhere in the country where satanic ritual abuse claims had proven true.²

The defense drew on research by Cornell psychologist Stephen Ceci showing that preschool-age children questioned repeatedly with suggestive prompts can construct detailed accounts of things that never happened. One example that landed at trial: a therapist had interpreted a child dunking a doll into a bucket of water as evidence the child had been subjected to water torture.²

On November 19, 1993, after six hours and forty-five minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted Akiki on all 35 counts.⁷ Juror David Fava called the prosecution’s case “a witch hunt.” Leaving the courthouse, Akiki told reporters he was not angry with the children: “I don’t have anything against the kids. I don’t blame them whatsoever. But I do feel anger against the therapists and the parents.” Coyne called the prosecution “an injustice of considerable magnitude.”²

How the Children’s Stories Were Produced

Instead of clinical psychologists, San Diego County had used social workers and marriage and family counselors to interview the preschoolers. Critics said the interviewers began with the premise that abuse had happened and used leading, repeated questioning to get answers matching that premise. Carol Hopkins, deputy forewoman of the 1991–92 San Diego County Grand Jury, put it plainly: the therapists “believed something had happened, set about to prove something had happened and created in the children the belief that something had happened.”²

Videos of the child interviews shown at trial captured the mechanics. Children who first denied any abuse began to describe it only after parents or therapists told them Akiki had done “bad things.” Deputies effectively adopted the therapists’ conclusions without demanding corroboration.⁵

The lead prosecutor’s outside role raised its own questions. Mary Avery had founded the San Diego Child Abuse Prevention Foundation, heavily funded by Jack Goodall, then CEO of Foodmaker, Inc., the parent company of Jack in the Box, and a member of the Faith Chapel congregation. According to reporting by the San Diego Union, Goodall met privately with District Attorney Ed Miller, and the case was then assigned to Avery. Avery also served on a county-funded Ritual Abuse Task Force.³

The Grand Jury Findings and Reforms

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors commissioned a review after the acquittal, and a grand jury released its findings on June 1, 1994. The report concluded that therapists and parents had “prodded children into fabricating fantastic accounts of ritual abuse.”⁴ It faulted District Attorney Miller for failing to supervise his deputies and said there was “no justification for further pursuit of the theory of satanic ritual child molestation in the investigation and prosecution of child abuse cases.”⁸

Grand Jury Foreman Joe Dolphin drew the wider lesson: “Overzealous prosecution can lead to injustice. Lawyers should try cases, not causes. When perspective gets lost, everything becomes muddled and tainted.”⁸

The grand jury reviewed 132 cases and found that acquittals and reversed convictions far outnumbered convictions in ritual abuse prosecutions.² The district attorney’s office adopted new protocols requiring that therapy sessions with child witnesses be recorded and barring group meetings with parents that could seed shared beliefs.¹

Political Fallout and Civil Settlement

The case ended Ed Miller’s political career. After 23 years as district attorney, he sought a seventh term in 1994 and was buried by public anger over the prosecution. The San Diego Union-Tribune, previously supportive, called the Akiki prosecution a “witch hunt” and urged him to retire.⁹ Miller was defeated in the June 1994 primary, beating only one of four challengers, and Paul Pfingst, a former prosecutor from Miller’s own office, won the general election that November.¹⁰

In September 1994, Akiki filed a civil suit seeking $110 million from San Diego County, the prosecutors, the child therapists, and Faith Chapel.⁴ The case was settled for more than $2 million, paid by the County of San Diego and other defendants.¹

Place in the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic

Observers called the prosecution “San Diego’s McMartin,” after the Manhattan Beach preschool case that launched the national wave of ritual abuse prosecutions in 1983 and ended without a conviction after becoming the longest and most expensive criminal case in American history.² The pattern was familiar by the time Akiki was charged: repeated suggestive interviews of preschool-age children in day-care or church settings, allegations that escalated from plausible misconduct to satanic rituals and murder, and no physical evidence.¹

Coming a decade after the McMartin allegations first surfaced, the Akiki acquittal is generally treated as a turning point. Jurors and the wider public had grown skeptical of ritual abuse claims, and the grand jury report that followed forced institutional changes in how San Diego County handled child abuse investigations.

1
PBS Frontline. Other Well-Known Cases
2
Los Angeles Times. The Case That Should Never Have Gone to Trial
3
San Diego Reader. The Memory Wars
4
New York Times. Falsely Charged With Child Abuse, Church Helper Sues
5
Reason. Remembering the Dale Akiki Case
6
San Diego Union-Tribune. Sharon Akiki, Wife of Man Acquitted in 91 Molestation Case, Dies
7
Los Angeles Times. Jury Acquits Akiki of All Charges in Abuse Case
8
Tampa Bay Times. Therapists Faulted in Child Abuse Case
9
Los Angeles Times. DA Under Fire in Re-Election Bid
10
San Diego Union-Tribune. Ed Miller, Longtime San Diego DA, Dies