The Satanic Panic: an analysis – III
In the previous post in this series, I briefly examined the North American “panic” over Dungeons & Dragons and other FRPGs that began in 1979. Now I’ll move to the case that triggered the main “Satanic Panic” – the McMartin Preschool case.
The city of Manhattan Beach, in South Bay, Los Angeles County, was to be the epicentre of the North American “Satanic Panic”, and its ’ground zero’, the McMartin Preschool. The institution had been founded in 1956 by Virginia S. McMartin and had a good local reputation, with a six-month waiting list for enrolments. It was administered by Virginia McMartin’s daughter, Peggy McMartin Buckey, and other members of the Buckey family, including Peggy’s daughter, Peggy Ann, and her son Raymond, were teachers at the school.
In August 1983, Judy Johnson, the mother of a boy attending the McMartin Preschool, accused Raymond Buckey of sexually abusing her two-year-old son. She was concerned that her son had recently begun to “play doctor” – pretending to give people injections or check them for fever – behaviour that the child stated, after repeated questioning, that he had learned from Buckey.
An initial medical examination of the boy was inconclusive, but Johnson began calling other parents of preschoolers, asking them to question their children. A second medical examination of Johnson’s son (after she had spoken to police) made a diagnosis of anal penetration. Buckey was arrested and his property searched, but he was later released for lack of evidence.
The police sent out an alarming form letter to 200 parents of children currently or previously attending the preschool, requesting that they question their children to determine whether they were either witnesses or victims of criminal acts of abuse in relation to Buckey. Although the police asked parents not to discuss the investigation amongst themselves, it was perhaps inevitable that they did so. Parents began questioning their children, and each other, in chance meetings or telephone calls. Meanwhile, Judy Johnson was calling the police on an almost daily basis, saying that her son had told her that Buckey had killed animals, dressed in clown, and other costumes, and forced him to have oral sex with a stranger in Buckey’s home. The police shared these allegations with worried parents and social workers who were interviewing the children.
Three individuals who played a prominent role in gathering evidence were in the case were psychiatrist Roland Summit, social worker Kee MacFarlane, and a doctor, Astrid Heger. In 1978, Summit delivered a paper outlining “The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome” (CSAAS) that was widely circulated before its eventual publication in 1983. Summit argued that children never fabricated accounts of sexual abuse and should be believed when they disclosed them, and that children who had been victims of incest might sometimes retract their statements in an effort to maintain family equilibrium. Summit’s theories were taken up by MacFarlane at a local organization, the Children’s Institute International.
MacFarlane introduced new interviewing procedures, such as using hand puppets and anatomically detailed dolls in her interviews with children. MacFarlane, working with Summit, believed that the role of the interviewer was to assist children to disclose their experiences and that this could only be done via persistent and leading questioning. If children did not remember being abused, it was because they suppressed the memories or disassociated themselves from it.1
As a result of MacFarlane and Summit’s methods, 350 of 400 children interviewed made allegations against one or more of the McMartin care providers. In addition, they also made accusations against soccer coaches, babysitters, neighbours, their own parents, local businessmen, news reporters, and television and film stars. A 2006 study of a sample of interviews from McMartin discusses how the interview styles used could elicit misleading statements from children, such as constant positive reinforcement; co-witness information (i.e. telling a child the interviewer has received information about the subject of the interview from other witnesses); inviting children to speculate and introducing new information into the interview.2
Astrid Heger conducted forensic examinations of children, using an instrument called a colposcope, that could detect and measure microscopic traumas in genitalia. Of the 150 children she examined, she concluded that 80 per cent of them had suffered sexual abuse.
Parents began taking their children out of the school. By October, an attorney for the Buckey family announced that enrolments at the school had dropped from 45 to 15. The Buckey family filed a lawsuit against the city of Manhattan Beach and its police department, claiming damage to their business and reputation.
As a result, more children disclosed accounts of abuse not only from Buckey but other members of his family, and three other care providers. Judy Johnson claimed that McMartin care workers had stapled her son’s eyes shut, buried him in a coffin and forced him to drink blood. She also accused them of wearing witch costumes, committing animal sacrifices, and chopping off a baby’s head.3 During the trial, Johnson’s claims were withheld from the Defence for three years.
Conspiracy or Satanic Cult?
In February 1984, the unfolding case became the centre of widespread press attention, and in March, the seven care providers at the McMartin Preschool were indicted by a grand jury on 115 counts of child molestation and one of conspiracy. Arrests soon followed. Ray Buckey and his mother were arrested in the full gaze of the media, with the cameras of Channel 7’s KABC-TV present. In a press conference, Assistant District Attorney Lael Rubin announced that the preschool was a front for child pornography. Kee MacFarlane, testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives, declared that the McMartin Preschool was linked to an organized and well-funded network of child predators.
The conspiracy angle was cranked up a notch with the intervention of Lawrence Pazder (author of Michelle Remembers – see part one of this series). Pazder, after the publication of Michelle Remembers, had been touring North America, giving interviews, appearing on television, and lecturing law enforcement and social workers about the dangers of “ritual abuse”. Pazder claimed that the McMartin case was at the centre of an international Satanic Conspiracy and met with social workers, police departments and parents caught up in the McMartin case. It was during the McMartin case that the first lists of “satanic indicators” began to circulate. Mary de Young comments:
“…after that meeting with Pazder, ritual abuse colonized their imagination. All of the interrogators, including the parents, began asking the children different kinds of questions, sometimes using devil puppets as props, and comparing answers against checklists of Satanic rituals, roles, ceremonies and holidays put together by New Christian Right crusaders. With the “ultimate evil” of ritual abuse as the rudder of their imagination, anything the children revealed was deemed plausible.”4
In the three years between the arrests and the criminal trial, another 100 children were interviewed and a further 150 adults questioned. Searches were conducted in over 80 locations where, for example, Buckey and his sister had supposedly buried caches of pornographic photographs of preschool children or had allegedly clubbed a horse to death in front of terrified children. The closed McMartin preschool was firebombed, and its grounds dug up in an attempt to discover a network of underground tunnels described by some of the children. Buildings were photographed and searched, the police enlisted the help of both the FBI and Interpol, and a national park in South Dakota, where Ray Buckey had once spent a summer vacation, was also excavated.5
At the preliminary hearing in June 1984, 13 children testified, giving accounts of being taken to cemeteries and made to watch their care providers hacking up dead bodies or watching black-robed figures dancing around an altar. The judge bound over all seven providers on 135 counts of child molestation and conspiracy, but within a few days, District Attorney Ira Reiner dropped all charges against five of the providers, leaving only Raymond Buckey and his mother Peggy McMartin Buckey to stand trial on 99 counts of molestation and one charge of conspiracy.
Not all those involved in the events supported the charges. A group calling themselves “The Friends of the McMartin Preschool Defenders” placed full-page advertisements in Southern Californian newspapers, deriding the case as a witch-hunt, and comparing Manhattan Beach with Salem. The accused providers gave interviews to newspapers, television and radio, and several civil suits and countersuits were undertaken. Virginia McMartin, for example, sued one of the parents who had labelled her a “satanic ritual abuser” on a nationally syndicated talk show. She won her case for slander, and although the judge only awarded her $1 in damages, claimed (according to the Los Angeles Times) it was a pyrrhic victory.
The trial
The criminal trial of the Buckeys began in July 1987 and lasted 28 months, at a cost of $185 million – the longest and most expensive trial in US history. The prosecution took the stance that anything the 14 children called on to testify said concerning ritual abuse should be taken literally and that any apparent contradictions or retractions should be understood because of their “accommodation” to the abuse and hence, a validation of their testimony. The defence disagreed and took the position that children’s statements needed careful interpretation as children can be led to believe that they have experienced things that have not actually occurred.
A key feature of the trial was the role of the expert witnesses, particularly the claimed basis of their authority and how scientific their testimony was. Kee MacFarlane, who had by this time had her ‘expert’ status reinforced by television and conference appearances, was revealed by the defence to be unlicensed and untrained for interviewing children. She continually attested that her interview methods enabled children to tell the truth about their abuse.
One child witness claimed to have seen Ray Buckey kill a rabbit and to have drunk its blood, and also to have chopped ponies in two with a machete. He also testified that he had been taken to the St. Cross Episcopal Church, where strangers in black robes gathered around children and chanted. He had also been taken to a ‘secret room’ at the preschool where he was molested, and to a supermarket during its normal hours of business. The secret room was never found. Two detectives testified that in searching Ray Buckey’s dwelling they had found “pornography”, but under cross-examination this turned out to be a copy of Playboy magazine.
On 18 January 1990, the jury returned their verdicts. Peggy McMartin Buckey was acquitted of all the charges against her, and her son Raymond of 29 of the 52 charges against him. Buckey was retried on eight of the remaining strongest charges, and finally, these too were dismissed by the judge.
The McMartin case proved to be the tip of the iceberg. Between 1983 and 1991, over 100 day care centres across the USA were subject to allegations of Satanic ritual abuse of children. More about that in the next post.
Sources
Richard Beck. 2015. We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. Public Affairs.
Sarah Hughes. 2017. “American Monsters: Tabloid Media and the Satanic Panic, 1970-2000. Journal of American Studies, 51 (2017), 3, 691-719.
Nadja Schreiber et al, Suggestive Interviewing in the McMartin Preschool and Kelly Michaels daycare abuse cases: A case study. Social Influence, 2006, 1 (1), 16-47.
Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker. 2001. Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. Authors Choice Press.
Mary de Young. 2004. The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic. Jefferson, North Carolina. McFarland & Company, Inc.
Footnotes
- MacFarlane assumed the role of a lead investigator. Under California State law, specialists were able to conduct investigations into child abuse cases without police oversight.
- Nadja Schreiber et al, ‘Suggestive Interviewing in the McMartin Preschool and Kelly Michaels daycare abuse cases: A case study.’ Social Influence, 2006, 1 (1), 16-47.
- Judy Johnson was later diagnosed as suffering from acute paranoid schizophrenia, and hospitalized. She was found dead in her home in December 1986.
- Mary de Young, 2004. The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic. Jefferson, North Carolina. McFarland & Company, Inc.
- Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker. 2001. Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. Authors Choice Press. Chapter 5.
