Content note: this article discusses false allegations of child sexual abuse throughout.
I want you to imagine that you have a young child at a local pre-school (or nursery). Out of the blue you receive a letter from the local police force advising you that: [warning, descriptions of child sexual assault]
This Department is conducting a criminal investigation involving child molestation by [a named employee of your child’s nursery].
Possible criminal acts include oral sex; fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area; and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense [sic] of taking the child’s temperature. Also, photos may have been taken of children without their clothing. Any information from your child regarding having ever observed [named employee] to leave a classroom alone with a child during any nap period, or if they have ever observed [named employee] tie up a child, is important.
The letter kindly includes a stamped-addressed-envelope for you to return an attached information form.
I assume, like me, you would panic about the potential impact on your child, remove them immediately, make sure other parents were aware, and demand some answers from the authorities. However, having given you this horrendous news, the letter also asks that you keep this information strictly confidential for now and advises that you must not discuss it outside your immediate family.
This actual warning letter was sent by the police chief of the small suburban Los Angeles town of Manhattan Beach to parents of the McMartin Pre-school, a private nursery for young children, owned and run by Virginia McMartin, her daughter Peggy Buckey, and Peggy’s 26-year-old son Ray Buckey, who worked as a caretaker at his grandmother’s school.
In August 1983 one parent, Judy Johnson, had taken her two-and-a-half-year-old son, Billy – who was a pupil at the school – to the doctor after he complained of having an itchy bum. There was some blood found on his anus and days later, she made a report to the local police, claiming that her estranged husband had been sodomising Billy. In addition, she also named Ray Buckey at the school as raping him, alongside much more lurid accusations.
Police interviewed Buckey, along with other staff, and put forward the accusations levelled by Johnson, even though Billy had shown no actual signs of abuse after further medical examinations. Accusations which were strenuously denied by Buckey and the teachers.
Police arrested Ray Buckey on September 7th of that year, and after searching his home, confiscated what they claimed was evidence – a Playboy magazine, a teddy bear and a rubber duck. Police then sent out the letter naming him to nearly 200 parents.
Over the next few weeks, understandably concerned parents reported various suspicions to the police. At the same time, Judy Johnson continued to make further accusations of severe sexual, emotional, and religiously themed abuse by all the staff at the school, not just Buckey.
In one police report she says that Peggy Buckey decapitated a baby, and that young Billy had been forced to drink its blood. That three women teachers had dressed as witches, and that Billy was buried alive in a satanic funeral (though he clearly got out). Judy Johnson raised more and more ludicrous accusations that could not possibly be true, even with the most cursory of investigations. For instance, Billy said he had had staples forced onto his ears, tongue and genitals and that Babs (another teacher) had put scissors in his eye. She claimed Ray Buckey locked Billy in the boot of his car and took him through a carwash, that rabbits were chopped up in front of the pupils, and that he had been taken on a flight from LAX to Palm Springs where he had taken part in a fantastical religious service involving a goat, a power drill and a dead baby.
But, because some other parents were now coming forward after they had received the letter with fears of their own, it was felt there had to be something here, even if Johnson’s more lurid accusations could be easily dismissed as coming from a troubled woman. Someone who had a history of mental health problems, and within a few years, would sadly be dead from alcohol related disease.
By the end of the year, the school had no option but to close after 28 years of otherwise unblemished education, and in February 1984, the story featured on the local TV news.
The number of potential victims skyrocketed following the TV story as parents of former pupils came forward and they soon overwhelmed the local force. The District Attorney asked Kee MacFarlane, a consultant for the Children’s Institute International to help interview the large number of children coming forward. She hit on the idea of using anatomically correct dolls and puppets so the children could demonstrate and perhaps help explain to the adult investigators what went on behind the gates of the school.
In addition, over 150 current and former pupils had been examined intimately looking for signs of abuse and Dr Heger of the Children’s Institute, reached the wild conclusion that over 80% of the children she had examined exhibited signs of abuse. Not actual physical signs though, she concluded this on medical histories and the children’s interviews alone.
One transcript gives you an indication of that was said to the children:
Interview #1 (an 8-year-old boy)
Kathleen MacFarlane: Mr. Monkey [a puppet] is a little bit chicken, and he can’t remember any of the naked games, but we think that you can, ’cause we know a naked game that you were around for, ’cause the other kids told us, and it’s called Naked Movie Star. Do you remember that game, Mr. Alligator [a puppet held by the child], or is your memory too bad?
Boy: Um, I don’t remember that game.
MacFarlane: Oh, Mr. Alligator.
Boy: Umm, well, it’s umm, a little song that me and [a friend] heard of.
MacFarlane: Oh.
Boy: Well, I heard out loud someone singing, “Naked Movie Star, Naked Movie Star.”
MacFarlane: You know that, Mr. Alligator? That means you’re smart, ’cause that’s the same song the other kids knew and that’s how we really know you’re smarter than you look. So you better not play dumb, Mr. Alligator.
Boy: Well, I didn’t really hear a whole lot. I just heard someone yell it from out in the _ Someone yelled it.
MacFarlane: Maybe. Mr. Alligator, you peeked in the window one day and saw them playing it, and maybe you could remember and help us.
Boy: Well, no, I haven’t seen anyone playing Naked Movie Star. I’ve only heard the song.
MacFarlane: What good are you? You must be dumb.
Boy: Well I don’t know really, umm, remember seeing anyone play that, ’cause I wasn’t there, when – I -when people are playing it.
It goes on in that vein, with interviewer giving the kid the answers she wants, and encouraging a very young child to agree with her.
Subsequent blinded examinations showed no signs of sexual trauma.
By March 1984, MacFarlane and her team had diagnosed 360 students as having been abused. After a Grand Jury hearing, 115 charges of child sex abuse were brought against Ray, his mother Peggy and grandmother Virginia McMartin, as well as his sister Peggy Ann and three other employees: Mary Ann Jackson, Bette Raidor, and Babette Spitler. Just two months later, a further 93 indictments were raised by the District Attorney, who was under severe pressure from parents and the local media.
Ray Buckey was held in jail pending trial.
Certain similar stories seemed to crop up from the children’s interviews. Several said they were trapped in tunnels underneath the school, sometimes for the whole day. Despite this, searches of the school and homes of the accused, failed to discover anything remotely consistent with abuse and paedophilia on such a grand scale. No nude photos of children were found despite the accusations of these being taken and traded by the defendants.
In March 1985, a group of ‘concerned parents’ dug up the vacant lot beside the building to locate the fabled tunnels that had supposedly held their young children whilst their fellow pupils had been abused above them. The DA even hired an archaeological firm to search the school. No tunnels were ever found.
The trial process had begun in early 1984 and during the preliminary proceedings, video of the interviews of the children were shown that clearly demonstrated the therapists asking leading and suggestive questions, affirming answers they wanted to hear and refuting those that leaned the other way.
It was clear that the children’s answers where not just contradictory but increasingly bizarre and riddled with inconsistences – as you might expect from pre-school kids being led by over-zealous questioners.
The preliminary hearing went on for over a year and by the end some members of the prosecution team expressed doubts about the case. At the end of 1985, the prosecutors dropped the charges against all the defendants, except Ray and his mother Peggy. The case had so far cost L.A. County over $4m and had still not yet gone the actual trial. Ray had been held in jail for nearly two years.
But the media and concerned parents demanded that someone should be accountable, so the full trial began in July 1987 and lasted until November 1989, with a further 10 weeks of jury deliberations.
One of the lines the prosecution followed was Buckey’s fascination with, and belief in pyramid power – a pseudoscientific belief that objects placed under a pyramid are subjected to certain life-preserving properties. He had one suspended over his bed, regularly wore a pyramid shaped hat, and had attended pyramid healing conferences. This ‘obsession’, as the prosecutors called it, clearly demonstrated to them that Ray was involved in satanic rituals, therefore confirming the more lurid accusations of witchcraft and blood-sacrifice had a basis in fact.
The court heard from several parents who nearly all told the same story. They had had no suspicion of anything untoward until the police letter landed on their doorstep. After taking their kids to CII and them being interviewed by Kee MacFarlane and her staff, the parents became convinced that the children had suffered horrific, ritualistic abuse.
The children, now aged between eight to fifteen, told their stories to the court, including lurid tales of Ray Buckey scaring them into silence by cutting up cats and rabbits with a knife. Clearly many of them suffered from trauma from their experience, but more likely from the hands of the investigators than from Ray Buckey.
The jury dismissed all the accusations against Peggy and all but 13 of the charges against Ray. They were deadlocked over these.
Following increasing pressure from child-protections groups and parents of the pupils, the DA staged a retrial. This time, after only three months, the new jury still remained deadlocked on the remaining charges. The DA never took it to a third trial.
The trial left scars on the McMartin/Buckeys and the other accused. Ray technically has never been acquitted, and he had spent 5 years in jail before being bailed. The harm done to the children because of invasive examinations and the emotional trauma of being caught up in such a harrowing process is incalculable. Ray himself said “Those children went through hell… but I’m not the cause, and neither is my mother”. Instead, he accused the “…adults who took this case and made it what is was.”
In the longer term, the McMartin Pre-school case as it was known, became part of the wider Satanic Panic that swept the US in the final decades of the 20th century. The idea, promulgated by some psychiatrists and campaigners – often with a highly religious outlook – was that satanists were actively recruiting children and young adults into partaking in ritualistic abuse of other children, or of suffering abuse themselves, and this was responsible for increasing drug use, alienation, self-harm and suicide attempts by young people nationally.
The social worker tasked with the initial investigation, Kee MacFarlane, would later go on to testify before the US Congress that she believed there was a nationwide conspiracy of like-minded individuals who took part in organised satanic ritual abuse of children.
Throughout the 80’s, various pressure groups, many with overtly Christian associations, campaigned, and had some success with the wider public and politicians, against the pursuits of US teenagers and children, which their parents saw as anti-Christian and satanic. Groups like B.A.A.D (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons) highlighted what they saw as the role of such games, alongside heavy-metal music, easy access to pornography and sexualised media, in satanic cult recruitment. Some groups alleged there was a ‘Holocaust’ of teenagers in the US being murdered by satanists.
In the UK several similar unfounded prosecutions were brought, including the Cleveland Abuse scandal, and similar cases in Orkney, Rochdale and Nottingham.
By the Mid-90’s the Satanic Panic (as it had become known) had largely disappeared, and prosecutions involving Satanic Ritualised Abuse (SRA) were no longer being brought to courts. However, since then many of the tropes and fears of SRA are now being spread by QAnon followers, so unfortunately it will likely never go away.
