The McMartin Trial: CII Interviews, Verdicts, and Recantations

The McMartin preschool trial was a Los Angeles County child sexual abuse prosecution that ran from 1983 to 1990, cost taxpayers more than $15 million, and ended without a single conviction. Seven teachers at the Virginia McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were charged with hundreds of counts of molestation after interviewers concluded that 350 children had been abused. Charges against five defendants were dropped before trial. The two who went to trial, Ray Buckey and his mother Peggy McMartin Buckey, were acquitted on most counts, with juries deadlocking on the rest. It remains one of the longest and most expensive criminal trials in American history, and it is now widely cited as a case study in suggestive child interviewing and moral panic.

How the Case Began

On August 12, 1983, a Manhattan Beach mother named Judy Johnson called police to report that her two-and-a-half-year-old son had been molested by Ray Buckey, a teacher at the McMartin preschool. She said she had found a spot of blood on her son’s body after he attended the school. Buckey was arrested on September 7, 1983, and released for insufficient evidence.¹

The next day, Manhattan Beach Police Chief Harry Kuhlmeyer mailed a letter to roughly 200 parents of current and former McMartin students. The letter named Buckey as a suspect and asked families to question their children about specific acts of abuse, seeding the investigation before it had really started.²

In October 1983, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office brought in Kee MacFarlane of Children’s Institute International (CII) to interview children. CII staff interviewed roughly 400 children over the following months and concluded that 350 of them had been sexually abused.³

The Seven Defendants and the Charges

A grand jury indicted seven people on March 22, 1984, on 115 counts of child sexual abuse. A superseding complaint that May expanded the case to 208 counts. The defendants were Ray Buckey; his mother, preschool administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey; his grandmother and school founder Virginia McMartin, then 78; his sister Peggy Ann Buckey; and teachers Mary Ann Jackson, Bette Raidor, and Babette Spitler.

By the time of the preliminary hearing, the allegations had grown to include nude photography, satanic rituals, animal sacrifices, and secret underground rooms and tunnels beneath the school. None of it was supported by physical evidence. The preliminary hearing before Judge Aviva Bobb ran 18 months. She ordered all seven defendants to stand trial on 135 charges.²⁴

Why the Case Fell Apart: The CII Interviews

The interviews that produced the allegations became the case’s central weakness. MacFarlane used puppets, anatomically detailed dolls, and what she called a “funnel approach,” starting with open questions and moving toward specific ones. Defense attorneys said the technique amounted to telling children what had happened and pressing them until they agreed.

Testifying in 1988, MacFarlane acknowledged telling children that “all the kids’ mommies and dads now know what happened” and that “all the other kids told me.” She introduced terms like “naked,” “yucky secrets,” and “horsey game” to children who had not mentioned them. She encouraged children to have puppets “beat up” dolls representing defendants. Children who gave answers the interviewers didn’t like were asked again.⁵

The defense also challenged MacFarlane’s credentials. She held a master’s in social work but no professional license, though she had listed herself as a licensed psychotherapist on her resume. Judge William Pounders, who presided over the first trial, said in court that he had concerns about her credibility and her inconsistent memory of her own procedures.³

After the acquittals, jury foreman Luis Chang put the problem plainly: “The interview tapes were too biased; too leading. That’s the main crux of it.”⁶

Judy Johnson’s Unraveling and Withheld Evidence

The original accuser’s claims grew stranger as the investigation continued. Johnson told investigators that Ray Buckey wore capes and Santa Claus costumes, that teachers chopped up rabbits, that her son had been forced to drink blood in satanic rituals, and that Buckey could fly. She also claimed an AWOL Marine had broken into her home and molested her child.⁷

Johnson was hospitalized for a psychotic episode in March 1985 and died of alcohol poisoning in December 1986, before any trial. Prosecutors had known about her mental instability but did not tell the defense. They also failed to disclose that Johnson’s son could not identify Ray Buckey in a police lineup.⁸²

Two of the three original prosecutors, Glenn Stevens and Christine Johnston, believed as many as four of the seven defendants were innocent and clashed with lead prosecutor Lael Rubin. Both were removed from the case in January 1986. Stevens later testified under immunity that he had withheld exculpatory information about a July 1984 phone call from Johnson containing claims he found “preposterous.” He said he had concluded by then that Johnson “may be a little off” and acknowledged he “absolutely” should have turned the information over. Stevens also testified he no longer believed Ray Buckey was “legally guilty.”⁹⁷

Charges Dropped Against Five Defendants

In January 1986, newly elected District Attorney Ira Reiner dropped all charges against five of the seven defendants: Virginia McMartin, Peggy Ann Buckey, Mary Ann Jackson, Bette Raidor, and Babette Spitler. He said the evidence against them was “incredibly weak” and cited a “moral and ethical obligation not to file criminal charges where the evidence is insufficient.” Reiner also publicly questioned the CII interviews, saying children may have “embellished their stories” because of “suggestive questions.”¹⁰

The prosecution went forward against Ray Buckey on 79 counts and Peggy McMartin Buckey on 20. Years later, Reiner said dropping only five had been a mistake: “I made a mistake by not dismissing against all the defendants.”¹¹

The First Trial and the Verdicts

Jury selection began on April 20, 1987. The trial ran about 33 months with 124 witnesses, making it the longest criminal trial in United States history at the time.¹²

Judge William Pounders presided. He denied a defense motion to dismiss after the revelations about withheld evidence. He allowed the prosecution to introduce Ray Buckey’s interest in “pyramid power” and a “pyramid hat” as supposed indicators of ritual activity. He also ruled Judy Johnson’s son “legally unavailable” as a defense witness on stress grounds. The trial did include a procedural first for the state: closed-circuit television testimony from a child witness, permitted under a new California law.²⁴

The jury deliberated for nine weeks. On January 18, 1990, it acquitted Peggy McMartin Buckey on all counts and acquitted Ray Buckey on 52 of the 65 charges against him. It deadlocked on the remaining 13, with seven of the twelve jurors voting to acquit on all of them.¹

The Retrial and Final Dismissal

Reiner chose to retry Ray Buckey on eight of the 13 deadlocked counts, involving three alleged victims. Judge Pounders was removed from the retrial after defense attorney Danny Davis successfully argued he could not fairly review challenges to his own earlier rulings. Judge Stanley Weisberg was assigned instead.¹³

On July 27, 1990, after 15 days of deliberation, the second jury declared itself hopelessly deadlocked on all eight counts. A majority favored acquittal on seven of the eight, with a single holdout preventing unanimous verdicts. Weisberg declared a mistrial. Reiner declined a third trial and the remaining charges were dismissed. After seven years and seven defendants, the case ended with zero convictions.¹⁴

The Tunnel Claims

One of the most persistent elements of the case was the allegation that a network of secret tunnels ran beneath the preschool. More than a dozen former students made such claims, though no child testified about tunnels at trial.¹⁵

Official investigators used sonar equipment in 1985 and found no underground chambers. Prosecutors scraped and examined the floor tiles and concrete slab and found no signs of patching or separate construction.¹⁵

In 1990, before the school was demolished, a group of parents hired Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI’s Los Angeles bureau, to conduct a private excavation. Working with archaeologist Gary Stickel and volunteers, Gunderson dug for over a month, claimed to find “two probable tunnels,” and collected more than 2,000 artifacts including animal bones, a saucer with a pentagram, and a 1982 Disneyland bag. Critics attributed the material to the property’s earlier use as a horse stable and to old utility lines. Even Stickel said he could not be “100% certain” about the tunnels. A 2002 academic paper by W. Joseph Wyatt concluded the physical evidence was the filled-in remains of a rural trash pit that predated the school.¹⁶¹⁷

What Happened to the Defendants

Ray Buckey spent five years in jail awaiting trial. He was arrested in September 1983, held without bail beginning in June 1984, and released in February 1989 after his bail was reduced to $1.5 million. He was 31 at the time of the retrial. After dismissal, he filed a civil rights lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court. In a CBS interview afterward he said: “Those poor children went through hell, but I’m not the cause of their hell and neither is my mother. The cause of their hell is the adults who took this case and made it what it was.”⁸²

Peggy McMartin Buckey filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Los Angeles County, the City of Manhattan Beach, former District Attorney Robert Philibosian, CII, MacFarlane, and others. A federal judge dismissed it, but the Ninth Circuit reversed and allowed her to amend her claims of a conspiracy to violate her constitutional rights.¹⁸

Both Ray and Peggy Buckey lost their homes, jobs, and life savings. The preschool, which Peggy and Virginia McMartin had closed permanently on January 13, 1984, was demolished in 1991.⁸

Virginia McMartin, the school’s founder, died on December 17, 1995, at age 88 after a series of strokes. A lifelong Christian Scientist, she never received medical treatment. She had lost her school and her savings. In 1991 she filed a slander suit against a parent who had accused her of satanic rituals; a jury awarded her $1. She denied all charges to the end of her life. Of the accusation that she had exposed herself to children, she said: “It was such an awful thing to say against an old lady.”¹⁹

Recantations by Former Students

In 2005, Kyle Zirpolo, who had testified as a child under the name Kyle Sapp, publicly recanted in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. “I said a lot of things that didn’t happen. I lied,” he told journalist Debbie Nathan. He said he had always known his stories were fabricated and did not suffer from false memories.²⁰

Zirpolo described pressure during the CII interviews: “Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for.” His stepfather was a Manhattan Beach police officer, and he felt he needed to produce the right answers to protect his family. He drew on his own church to make up satanic details: “I think I got the satanic details by picturing our church. I’d just throw a twist in there with Satan and devil-worshipping.”²⁰

Former McMartin student Maureen Flannigan has described herself as an “unwitting victim” of CII’s techniques, saying she gave accounts she knew were untrue in order to “get out of that room.”¹¹

What the Case Changed

McMartin is now a standard reference in discussions of suggestive interviewing, false memory, and the reliability of child testimony. Researchers at UC Irvine and other institutions have credited it with driving the development of improved forensic interviewing protocols, including the NICHD protocol, which emphasizes open-ended, non-leading questions and is now used by child advocacy centers across the country.¹¹

The case also coincided with changes in how courts handle child witnesses. The 1990 Supreme Court decision in Maryland v. Craig held that closed-circuit televised testimony by children is constitutionally permissible when a judge makes a case-specific finding that the child would suffer serious emotional trauma from face-to-face testimony. That same year Congress passed the Victims of Child Abuse Act, which included provisions for closed-circuit and videotaped testimony.²¹

McMartin was not the only prosecution of its kind. It was the most prominent of a wave of mass daycare-abuse cases in the 1980s and early 1990s that produced convictions later overturned on appeal, including that of New Jersey teacher’s aide Margaret Kelly Michaels, whose 1988 conviction on 115 counts was reversed in 1993 for “egregious prosecutorial abuses” tied to suggestive questioning.²²

A 2014 Retro Report documentary described McMartin as “the preschool sex abuse case that changed how molestation is investigated,” framing its most durable effect as the shift toward evidence-based forensic interviewing and away from the techniques that had produced the original allegations.²³

1
Famous-Trials.com. McMartin Preschool Case Chronology
2
Famous-Trials.com. McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial
3
Los Angeles Times. McFarlane Describes Her Interview Methods
4
Los Angeles Times. McMartin Case Background
5
Famous-Trials.com. Kee MacFarlane Testimony
6
Famous-Trials.com. McMartin Trial Account
7
Los Angeles Times. Stevens Testifies at McMartin Hearing
8
Famous-Trials.com. McMartin Case Chronology
9
UPI. Two McMartin Prosecutors Removed
10
New York Times. Officials Drop Case Against Five on Child Abuse
11
Los Angeles Times. Crimes of the Times: McMartin Preschool
12
UPI. Theories on Why McMartin Trial Took So Long
13
Los Angeles Times. New Judge Named for McMartin Retrial
14
Los Angeles Times. Mistrial Declared in McMartin Case
15
Los Angeles Times. Parents Seek Evidence at McMartin Site
16
Los Angeles Times. Excavation at McMartin Site
17
Marshall University. Analysis of McMartin Tunnel Claims
18
U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Buckey v. County of Los Angeles
19
Los Angeles Times. Virginia McMartin Dies at 88
20
Los Angeles Times. Kyle Zirpolo McMartin Recantation
21
American Academy of Pediatrics. The Child Witness in the Courtroom
22
New York Times. Prosecutors Drop Charges in Abuse Case From Mid-80s
23
Retro Report. The Preschool Sex Abuse Case That Changed How Molestation Is Investigated