McMartin Preschool: Indictments, Ray Buckey, and the Retrial

The McMartin Preschool case was a child sexual abuse prosecution in Manhattan Beach, California, that ran from 1983 to 1990, indicted seven people connected to a family-run preschool on hundreds of counts, and ended without a single conviction. It became the longest and most expensive criminal case in American history to that point, costing taxpayers an estimated $15 million, and it remains the defining example of the day care abuse hysteria that swept the United States in the 1980s.¹ The prosecution was built almost entirely on children’s testimony that was later shown to have been shaped by suggestive interviewing, and its collapse reshaped how investigators are trained to question child witnesses.

The Preschool and the Family Behind It

Virginia McMartin founded the preschool in Manhattan Beach about thirty years before the case began. Her daughter, Peggy McMartin Buckey, owned and administered the school. Peggy’s son, Raymond “Ray” Buckey, worked there as a teacher, and Peggy’s daughter, Peggy Ann Buckey, was also involved. The school operated for more than two decades without complaints before the 1983 investigation.¹

How the Accusation Started

On August 12, 1983, a Manhattan Beach parent named Judy Johnson told police that her two-and-a-half-year-old son had been molested by Ray Buckey. Her reports to investigators grew stranger over time, eventually including claims that Buckey had sodomized her son with the boy’s head in a toilet, wore a Santa Claus costume, locked her child in a car trunk, and that teachers chopped up rabbits in front of children.²

Ray Buckey was arrested on September 7, 1983. The following day, Manhattan Beach Police Chief Harry L. Kuhlmeyer Jr. sent a letter to roughly 200 current and former McMartin parents. The letter identified Buckey, described the specific acts he was suspected of, and asked parents to question their own children about “oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy.”³ Parents were asked to keep the investigation confidential, but word spread rapidly and the letter set off widespread panic.⁴

Judy Johnson was later hospitalized after a psychotic episode in March 1985. Prosecutors’ own records described her as an “acute paranoid schizophrenic,” and in January 1987 it emerged that they had withheld evidence of her mental illness from the defense.⁵ She died of alcohol poisoning in December 1986, before the trial began and before she ever testified.²

The Interviews That Built the Case

In October 1983, the District Attorney’s Office referred children who had attended the school to Kee MacFarlane, a social worker at Children’s Institute International (CII) in Los Angeles. By March 1984, CII had identified 360 children as sexual abuse victims.²

The interview methods would become the case’s central problem. MacFarlane used anatomically detailed dolls and puppets and encouraged children to talk about “yucky secrets.” She told children during sessions that other kids had already disclosed abuse and that their parents already knew what had happened. She asked leading questions, used specific terms like “naked games” and “horsey games,” and at times encouraged children to hit dolls representing suspects.⁶ Children who gave answers consistent with abuse were praised; children who denied it were met with skepticism or redirected. MacFarlane described the pattern as the “No-maybe-sometimes-yes syndrome.”⁷

As interviewing continued, the accounts grew more extreme. Children described teachers killing animals, digging up bodies in cemeteries, being taken through secret underground tunnels, and participating in satanic rituals. During photo identification exercises, children misidentified community figures and even the actor Chuck Norris as abusers.⁵ CII received more than $11 million in government grants by 1989.²

The Indictments and the McMartin Seven

On March 22, 1984, a grand jury indicted seven people on 115 counts of child sexual abuse: Ray Buckey, Peggy McMartin Buckey, Virginia McMartin, Peggy Ann Buckey, and teachers Mary Ann Jackson, Bette Raidor, and Babette Spitler. They became known as the “McMartin Seven.”⁸ Two months later, 93 additional counts were added. By the preliminary hearing, the prosecution was claiming 397 separate sexual crimes.¹

District Attorney Robert Philibosian was in the middle of a reelection campaign when the indictments were filed. Two weeks before the June 1984 primary, his office added 92 further counts and expanded the number of alleged child victims from 18 to 42.⁹ Philibosian later acknowledged the prosecution had been a mistake given how thoroughly the evidence had been contaminated by suggestive interviewing.⁴

The preliminary hearing ran for more than two years, ending in January 1986. By that point, Ira Reiner had defeated Philibosian and taken over as District Attorney. After reviewing the evidence, Reiner dropped all charges against Virginia McMartin, Peggy Ann Buckey, Mary Ann Jackson, Bette Raidor, and Babette Spitler, citing what he called a “complete absence of evidence” against them.⁵ At least one prosecutor on the internal team had already concluded that four of those defendants were innocent.¹⁰ Only Ray Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, would stand trial.

Ray Buckey’s Five Years in Jail

Ray Buckey was held without bail after his arrest and spent nearly five years in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail waiting for trial. In December 1987, Judge William Pounders set bail at $3 million, which the defense said was impossible to post. A year later, Pounders reduced it to $1.5 million, remarking that he found it “inappropriate for Ray Buckey to be in custody for nearly five years without having been found guilty.”¹¹ Buckey was released in February 1989 after pledging real estate worth twice the bail. Conditions included surrender of his passport, a 24-hour guard, no contact with anyone under 14, and a bar on entering Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, or Hermosa Beach without court permission.¹² His mother spent two years in jail before her release.⁵

The Trial and the Verdict

Opening statements began on July 14, 1987. The trial ran for thirty months, the longest criminal proceeding in American history at the time. Ray Buckey was represented by attorney Daniel “Danny” Davis; Peggy Buckey was represented by Dean Gits. The prosecution team included Deputy District Attorneys Lael Rubin and Glenn Stevens.¹⁰

Davis called his approach a “common sense defense” aimed at exposing the prosecution as a “witch hunt.” The defense played the CII interview videotapes in court, showing jurors therapists coaching children and rewarding them for expected answers. Psychologist Michael Maloney testified that the techniques followed a “script” that discouraged spontaneous responses. Medical expert David Paul contradicted the prosecution’s claims of physical evidence. Davis emphasized what investigators had not found despite a five-agency international search that included the FBI: no secret tunnels, no photographs, no child pornography.⁵ An interview with prosecutor Glenn Stevens revealed the prosecution had also withheld the fact that Judy Johnson’s son had been unable to identify Ray Buckey in a police lineup.¹

On January 18, 1990, the jury returned its verdict. Peggy McMartin Buckey was acquitted on all counts. Ray Buckey was acquitted on 52 of the 65 counts he faced, and the jury deadlocked on the remaining 13. Seven of the twelve jurors had voted to acquit on all counts.⁸ Foreperson Luis Chang said the CII interview tapes were “too biased, too leading. That’s the main crux of it.” Juror Mark Bassett said some experts’ testimony “told you more about the expert than the child.” Another juror put it simply: “Whether I believe he did it and whether it was proven are very different.”¹

The Retrial and Dismissal

Under public and parental pressure, Reiner pursued a retrial of Ray Buckey on eight of the thirteen deadlocked counts, involving three children. Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg presided. The retrial ran three months and ended on July 27, 1990, when Weisberg declared a mistrial after the jury reported it was “hopelessly deadlocked” following fifteen days of deliberation. The foreman said a majority had favored acquittal on seven of the eight counts.¹³ Reiner declined to bring a third trial, and all remaining charges against Ray Buckey were dismissed.

What Happened to the Defendants

Virginia McMartin, 76 when she was indicted, had her charges dropped in 1986. She lost the preschool and her life savings and received almost nothing from civil suits. She died on December 17, 1995, at age 88, after a series of strokes.¹⁴

Peggy McMartin Buckey, acquitted in 1990, “lost everything” and never fully recovered, according to her attorney Danny Davis. She died on December 15, 2000, at age 74.¹⁵

Ray Buckey went on to attend law school. His sister, Peggy Ann Buckey, resumed her teaching career.¹⁵ In 1991, Peggy McMartin Buckey, Ray Buckey, Virginia McMartin, and Peggy Ann Buckey won a slander lawsuit against a parent who had accused them of satanic rituals on national television. A judge awarded them $1 each, ruling they had not proved the parent intended to cause emotional distress or that their reputations had been further damaged.¹⁴

Why the Case Still Matters

McMartin was the most visible of dozens of day care prosecutions during the 1980s that followed a similar arc: an allegation, suggestive interviews, escalating and fantastical claims, and charges brought despite the absence of physical evidence. At the Wee Care Nursery in Maplewood, New Jersey, teacher Kelly Michaels was convicted of 115 counts of abuse in 1985; the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed her conviction in 1993, finding the interviews “highly improper and utilized coercive and unduly suggestive methods.” At Fells Acres in Malden, Massachusetts, allegations involved clowns and robots in a “magic room,” and convictions were later overturned or commuted. At Little Rascals Day Care in Edenton, North Carolina, allegations included boats, hot air balloons, and outer space; life sentences were imposed and later overturned, and charges were eventually dropped.¹⁶

Scholars have described the phenomenon as a moral panic tied to rapidly rising day care use as more women entered the workforce, combined with anxieties about shifting family roles and amplified by advocacy materials from groups such as “Believe the Children.”¹⁷

The case forced changes in how children are interviewed. The U.S. Department of Justice contracted UCLA psychology professors R. Edward Geiselman and Robert Fisher to develop new forensic interview standards in direct response to what had gone wrong. The result, the Cognitive Interview for Children, replaced leading and reward-based questioning with open-ended techniques: interviewers build rapport, let the child lead the narrative, and are barred from inserting information the child has not already provided. The methods are now taught to psychologists and detectives who specialize in child abuse investigations.¹⁸ Later research on the McMartin-era transcripts confirmed what the jurors sensed: interviewers introduced new suggestive information at significantly higher rates than standard practice, praised desired answers, expressed disapproval at denials, and pressured children to match other witnesses’ accounts. Experimental studies have shown reinforcement alone can produce false accusation rates of 35 to 52 percent.¹⁹

Sociologists and journalists have since drawn direct lines between the 1980s satanic panic and the QAnon movement that emerged in 2017, noting that both rest on claims of elite networks ritually abusing children and both spread through the dominant media of their moment. Sociologist Mary de Young, who studied the day care cases extensively, has characterized both as moral panics that “fizzle” when evidence fails to materialize. Danny Davis called the pattern “social contagion” operating on “a process and a timeline.”²⁰

1
Famous-Trials.com. McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial
2
University of Missouri-Kansas City. McMartin Trial Chronology
3
University of Missouri-Kansas City. Letter to McMartin Parents
4
Los Angeles Times. Crimes of the Times: McMartin Preschool
5
Time. Six Years of Trial by Torture
6
Famous-Trials.com. MacFarlane Testimony
7
Los Angeles Times. MacFarlane Testimony Coverage
8
Famous-Trials.com. McMartin Trial Chronology
9
Los Angeles Times. McMartin Pretrial Analysis
10
Los Angeles Times. McMartin Prosecution Team
11
UPI. Bail Reductions in McMartin Case
12
Los Angeles Times. Ray Buckey Released on Bail
13
Los Angeles Times. McMartin Retrial Mistrial
14
Los Angeles Times. Virginia McMartin Obituary
15
Los Angeles Times. Peggy McMartin Buckey Obituary
16
PBS Frontline. Day Care Abuse Cases – Outcomes
17
Wiley Online Library. McMartin Moral Panic Analysis
18
UCLA Newsroom. Geiselman Cognitive Interview
19
Taylor & Francis Online. Suggestive Interviewing in Daycare Cases
20
NPR. America’s Satanic Panic Returns, This Time Through QAnon