McMartin Preschool Case – What Really Happened and the Coverup

McMartin Preschool Case – What Really Happened and the Coverup

1) McMartin Preschool Revisited

2) Ray Buckey’s Press Corps and the Tunnels of McMartin

3) Cult and Ritual Abuse – It’s History, Anthropology, and Recent Discovery in Contemporary America – Indictment movie

4) Chronology of the McMartin Preschool Abuse Trials

5) Archaeological Investigations of the McMartin Preschool Site

6) Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children – Eberle’s

7) Denying ritual abuse of children

8) Interview of Jackie MacGauley

9) The Dark Tunnels of McMartin

10) Investigative Issues in Ritual Abuse Cases

11) Paul and Shirley Eberle: A Strange Pair of Experts

12) Additional articles

McMartin Preschool Revisited by Alex Constantine 1996 (in Virtual Government – CIA Mind Control Operations in America – Alex Constantine (Feral House Pub. 1997 ISBN 0-922915-45-8)

Welcome to Manhattan Beach

Paul Bynum graduated from college in 1972 and joined the Hermosa Beach police department a year later. At 31 he was promoted to the rank of chief detective. Bynum was not a traditional investigator. One fellow detective often thought he was “too bright to be a cop.” Off duty, he drove an MG and mixed with the ’60s survivors at the Sweetwater Café.

In 1976 Bynum was assigned the investigation of the Karen Klaas murder. Klaas was the divorced wife of Bill Medley, a vocalist for the Righteous Brothers. She was raped and murdered one morning about an hour after dropping her five-year-old son off at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach.

Neighbors told police they’d been alarmed at the sight of a menacing stranger before the murder wandering through the neighborhood. Police later entertained speculation that Klaas had been stalked. Throughout the week her body was found, this same stranger had popped up several times on her corner. A neighbor phoned Karen to warn her. She didn’t answer. When friends entered the back door of the house, concerned for her safety, they found a Caucasian male with a beard, about 5’7″, 28 years old, dressed in a long olive green coat with a tunic collar and boots. He was leaving through the front door. Klaas was found naked and unconscious. She died five days later. Nothing was stolen. Police had no indication that Klaas knew the man who assaulted her.

In 1984, shortly after indictments were handed to defendants in the McMartin child molestation case, Gerald Klaas, her husband, drove off a cliff in Oregon and was killed. Children alleged in a grand jury hearing that teachers at the preschool had threatened to kill family members if they talked about abuse, It was rumored around town that the Klaas deaths and the McMartin case may have been related. But police said no. “We have no leads, no suspects and we’re not coordinating with Manhattan Beach,” Hermosa Beach Lt. Mike Lavin told reporters.1

In 1979, Paul Bynum was forced out of the police department without an explanation despite an unblemished record. After Bynum had wrapped up an investigation of a series of murders of teenage girls in nearby Redondo Beach, culminating in the arrest and conviction of serial killers Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker, police chief Frank Beeson pressured Bynum to take a stress leave. Bynum was haunted by the serial murder investigation, but remained confident in his emotional stability. He refused the leave. The chief obtained an order from the city manager, and Bynum was forced out on an indefinite disability leave. He chalked it up to internal politics, “paranoia.” “When the papers reported that Beeson had shown up apparently drunk at his first Hermosa council meeting and dropped his revolver on the floor,” Bynum told reporter Kevin Cody, “he thought we had tipped reporters.” Beeson was unaware that reporters routinely attended meetings of the city council.2

Bynum set out on a new career as a private investigator. In March 1984, he was retained by the Buckeys’ defense attorney, Danny Davis, and in the course of his investigation came to the conclusion that children had been abused at the preschool. He found the video-taped interviews of the children by child therapists “credible.” One afternoon, Cody informed Bynum that hundreds of children had alleged molestation took place at the preschool. Bynum was shocked. He stammered he had no idea so many children were involved.

In 1986 he was called to testify at the trial of Ray Buckey by prosecutor Lael Rubin. The morning he was to appear a juror’s home was burglarized and Bynum’s testimony was rescheduled for the next morning. “Neither side is going to like what I have to say,” he told Cody. For one thing, there was the matter of Bynum’s lost citation books, records he’d kept while a detective in Hermosa Beach. When the police arrested Ray Buckey on molestation charges, the “lost” books were discovered on the preschool attendant’s desk. What were official police records doing in Buckey’s home? And Prosecutor Rubin had intended to ask Bynum about a map turned up by DA investigators in March 1986, pin-pointing the location of turtle shells Bynum had unearthed at the lot next to the McMartin preschool. (The children claimed teachers had killed turtles to demonstrate what would happen to them and their families if they talked about the molestations. Bynum, while retained by the defense, had managed to corroborate a key point in the testimony of the children.)

Bynum’s court appearance was preempted by “suicide,” although the timing left some parents in the case convinced he’d been murdered.3 His body was discovered by his wife at 5:45 in the morning. He died of a head shot from a .38 caliber pistol. “None of the half dozen people questioned who were close to Bynum could think of any reason why his involvement in the case might have driven him to suicide,” reported the Easy Reader in Manhattan Beach. “Paul was kind of a worrier,” said Stephen Kay, a deputy district attorney and friend of the Bynum family, “but there was no hint of suicide. He was very upbeat about his wife and new daughter, both of whom he adored.”4

The belief that Bynum had been murdered was fueled by the memory of another odd death, the alcohol toxicity that claimed the life of Judy Johnson. She was the first mother to speak publicly about child molestation at McMartin. and sympathizers of the Buckeys in the press have gone to great lengths to portray Johnson as “crazy.” Her life was inverted the day her son came home from the McMartin school, bleeding. Strangers entered her life, intimidated her. She believed she’d been poisoned. (In 1992, therapists at the L.A. Commission for Women’s Ritual Abuse Task Force were also poisoned, and corroborated their allegations with medical reports – the Los Angeles Times was given the reports, but ignored them and alleged the therapists were paranoid fantasists.5) She lived in fear, felt it necessary to keep a gun in the house. Her estranged husband appeared to have joined in the harassment campaign. She took to alcohol. She was allergic to alcohol. It poisoned her.

The death of Judy Johnson was met with howls of laughter in greater Los Angeles. She will be remembered as the delusional paranoiac who set in motion a wave of “hysteria” carried through Southern California by a sensational press and out across the plains, contaminating lives and decimating families everywhere. A groundless witch-hunt. This was the explanation doled out by “experts” from leading universities. Nevertheless, children who attended the preschool still insist they were abused. And the detailed memories of their parents are sharply at odds with the simple caricature of the case repeated endlessly in the press. They recall not suggestive questioning, but the long hours of testimony by dozens of children, the telephoned death threats, how some of the children suffered deep emotional problems requiring hospitalization. Knowing child pornography to be a highly lucrative business, they frown at the snickering over the childrens’ disclosures that they were forced to play “naked movie-star” games. They haven’t put aside as anomalous accident the first exhibit in the case, a physician’s report that one of the children suffered “blunt force trauma” of sexual areas.6 The parents were left to ponder why some of the toddlers in the care of the McMartins had chlamydia, a sexually-transmitted infection.7 Where was the humor in all of this?

Open Season

The parents wondered, like everyone else, at the incredibility of the charges – some said the children were lying – yet they had to question Peggy McMartin’s testimony that she only worked at the school for a short time, when payroll records showed that she had been employed there for years. To the families, the final verdict of Ray Buckey meant it was now “open season on children.”

The world was told redundantly that ABC’s Wayne Satz, the reporter who broke the case (killed by a heart attack in December, 1992 at age 47), and Kee MacFarlane, a therapist testifying for the prosecution, had an affair, as if this had any bearing on the allegations of the children. Even Oliver Stone, perhaps in ignorance, took to the bandwagon with a film made for HBO, written by Abby Mann, theorizing that hysteria in Manhattan Beach was kindled when one child returned home from school one afternoon with “a red bottom” – this would be the son of Judy Johnson, and he hadn’t been spanked – he was bleeding from the anus.

This hardly constitutes media “spin.” It is conscious participation in a felony. The account of the case pounded into collective memory by media repetition goes that far to distort the facts. The widespread media coverage was, according to Los Angeles Times editor Noel Greenwood, “a mean-spirited campaign” organized to discredit the children and their therapists.8 But why should certain members of the corporate press, and segments of the legal and psychiatric professions, go to such lengths to suppress evidence of organized child abuse at McMartin?

The traumatic crimes reported by the toddlers bear an uncanny resemblance to mind control programming, a specialty of certain classified federal agencies and cult cut-outs on the black budget payroll.8 The children are often ridiculed because some of their charges are impossible. Tunnels under the preschool? Too ludicrous to consider. But as it happens, there were tunnels, confirmed in 1993 by a team of five scientists from leading universities.

The unearthing of the tunnels, like much of the critical evidence, never made it to the courtroom. They have been discreetly excluded from newspaper accounts. Filling the void, Debbie Nathan, a widely published skeptic of ritual abuse, heaped ridicule on the tunnel allegations in the Village Voice in June 1990. She maintained the McMartin site had already been “painstakingly probed for tunnels. None were found”9 Nathan’s account is a fabrication. In fact, recalls Dr. Roland Summit, who contributed to the final report on the tunnel excavation, parents started digging and prosecutors, reluctantly forced to a showdown, “commissioned a superficial search of open terrain.” District Attorney Ira Reiner then declared the tunnel stories unfounded “without going under the concrete floor of the preschool.”Once the tunnels were officially discounted, attempts to explore for an underground reality were instant targets for ridicule.”10 Archeologist Gary Stickel was retained to lead the excavation on the re-commendation of Dr. Rainier Berger, chairman of UCLA’s Interdisciplinary Archeology Program, by parents of McMartin children.11 Initially Stickel sided with the Buckeys, believing the abuse allegations to be so much moonlight for hysterics. However, he’d heard of late homicide detective Paul Bynum, the first to dig at the site: Bynum apparently conducted his informal digging in February, 1984 (Daily Breeze, 1987). It is significant to note he did unearth some buried animal remains, “numerous pieces of tortoise shells and bones” (Daily Breeze, 1987). “There was keen interest at the time since it was reported that the children testified that tortoises, rabbits, and other small animals were mutilated to terrorize the children into keeping silent” (Daily Breeze, 1987).12

But “experts” courted by the press snaffled at the suggestion that animals were killed to frighten children at McMartin and other preschools around the country. It was not until 1993 that a study by the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect confirmed that children are not only threatened in day care settings, “most threats are very specific in terms of what the consequence of disclosure will be and how the threat will be carried out…. The use of such severe threats is obviously quite frightening to young children and is effective in preventing disclosure. In fact, it appears that threats used in day care center cases may go beyond what is usually needed to silence victims, and may in some instances be made for purposes of psychological terror in and of itself.”13

Into the Grotto

Most reporters in Southern California pooh-poohed evidence of coercion, but there was a great, gaping silence when the tunnels were found. “I asked my daughter,” recalls Jackie MacGauley, a mother of two children who attended the preschool, “‘How could they have taken you to these places without being seen?’ And she answered me as though I was silly to ask such a question. She said, ‘Through the tunnels, of course.'”

The Los Angeles Times ran a spate of features poking fun of the excavation team until actual evidence of tunnels was discovered. Then the Times ran a brief news item, one paragraph long, dryly noting that “evidence” of tunnels had been found, and never mentioned the subject again. The local Beach Reporter covered the story without a blush: “parents began to dig with shovels, allegedly in an area pointed out by a nine-year-old former student of the McMartin preschool, who told them to dig behind a cement planter in the northeast corner. When parents unearthed several broken turtle shells and a few bones, they stopped digging and notified the district attorney’s office.”

Once the entrance was exposed, Stickel used remote sensing equipment to read the terrain conductivity of the empty lot next to the preschool. The survey was conducted by a respected geophysicist, Robert Beer, working with an electromagnetic scanner. The tunnel opening was found precisely where children said it would be. Stickel: “Some of the children had stated there had been animal cages placed along that wall and that they had entered a tunnel under the cages.” A foreign soil deposit was found near the foundation. Clearing the anomaly with a backhoe, they found the roots of an avocado tree cut to clear a path for the tunnel. The roots had been cut with a hand saw and torn away, and shreds dangled on either wall of the tunnel.

That’s the moment editors at the Times chose to pull reporters off the story. All other news outlets rapidly followed suit. But the excavators cleared the foreign soil and followed the tunnel anyway. It “meandered under Classroom No. 4 and then most of Classroom No. 3…. There is no other scenario that fits all of the facts except that the feature was indeed a tunnel,” they concluded. “The date of the construction and use of the tunnel was not absolutely established, but an assessment of seven factors of data all indicate that it was probably constructed, used and completely filled back in sometime after 1966 (the construction date of the preschool).”14

Dr. E. Michael, a specialist in forensic geology in Malibu, was called to examine a cavity in the underground passage. Together with Dr. Herbert Adams of the geology department at Cal State University, a ground resistivity reading of the tunnel was followed from the preschool to a triplex next door, a traversing section parallel to the north wall of the school, 5 feet away, extending 20 feet eastward, 10 to 15 feet beneath the surface.15

Gerald Hobbs, a local tree surgeon for 25 years, did much of the actual digging. Hobbs: The children had told two different stories about this tunnel prior to the dig. One, that they had gone through the tunnel and came up in the house next door, and two, they had come up in the garage, which blocked the house from the street. At any rate, the tunnel went in that direction…. That evening I went to the house next door and followed the walk between the school and the house, only about 41/2 feet apart. I went about 30 feet down between the buildings and found a crawl space under the house. I bellied my way toward the southwest corner of the house. After going about 20 feet, I found an area inside the west wall of the house where the floor was cut out. If I remember correctly, the area of floor that was missing was 36″ X 38″ X 41”.16

A total of 77 animal bones were found buried at the McMartin site, an assortment of the osteo-remains of domestic cattle, chickens, dogs and a single rabbit.17 However, Debbie Nathan, the hide-bound “skeptic” of ritual abuse, a scion of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, told another story. The McMartin site, she insisted, had already been “painstakingly probed for tunnels” by the D.A.’s office. (Not so, as we’ve seen). “None were found. [The McMartin] parents have invested years believing in demonic conspiracies and underground nursery tunnels. (Until recently the parents were still digging. They came up with Indian artifacts).” No mention of Bynum’s independent findings. No mention of the dig as it happened in the real world. She reserves much of her scorn for former FBI agent Ted Gunderson and Jackie MacGauley. Nathan seems not to realize that Gunderson and MacGauley brought in Stickel and his geological team to defuse accusations they were directly engaged in the dig. They weren’t. The search for the tunnels was independent, and scores of volunteers pitched in.

Nathan’s refrain of “no evidence” is hollow. She has been known to contort around the facts of ritual abuse in a grotesque parody of journalism and is frequently blind to critical evidence. Nathan continues to find “no evidence” of abuse at McMartin despite the nightmares, the acting-out, medical molestation reports and sexual infections. The tunnel excavation, she assures with psychic certainty (and a sniff of condescension), is a “hoax.”

To come to the point: Nathan’s propaganda, repeated in the New York Times and a host of other corporate publications, happened to conceal a classified mind control operation the CIA and Pentagon had undertaken thirty years before….

End of Part One

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– Notes –

1. Kevin Cody, “Former HB Officer’s Suicide Adds Questions to McMartin Mystery,” Easy Reader (Manhattan Beach tabloid news weekly), November 17, 1987.

2. Ibid.

3. The Easy Reader obituary declares, “none of the half dozen people questioned who were close to Bynum could think of any reason why his involvement in the case might have driven him to commit suicide. But the timing of Bynum’s death and the controversy already surrounding the McMartin case … inevitably spawned speculation that a link existed between his suicide and his pending testimony.”

4. Cody.

5. The medical reports were reprinted in Alex Contantine, Psychic dictatorship in the U.S.A. Portland: Feral House, 1995, pp. 97-111.

6. McMartin trial record, evidentiary exhibit one.

7. Interviews with parents.

8. Alex Constantine, “Ray Buckey’s Press Corps and the Tunnels of Mc-Martin,” pp. 77-96.

9. Debbie Nathan, “What McMartin Started: The Ritual Abuse Hoax,” Village Voice, June 12, 1990.

10. Roland Summit, M.D., “Introduction,” Archeological Investigations of the McMartin Preschool Site, Manhattan Beach, California, unpublished report by archeologist Gary Stickel of the McMartin Tunnel Project, 1993, p. ii.

11. Gary Stickel, foreword to Archeological Investigations.

12. Ibid.

13. Kelly, Brant and Waterman, “Sexual Abuse of Children in Day Care Centers,” Journal of Child Abuse & Neglect (17), 1993, p. 74

14. Stickel, Archeological Investigations, p. 95. The assessment of the tunnel’s age was corroborated by Dr. Jon Michael, a geologist on the McMartin project.

15. Dr. E. Michael, in a letter to Dr. Gary Stickel, July 2, 1992, pp. 2-3.

16. Gerald Hobbs, “Notes on Investigation of the Neighboring Tri-plex,”in Archeological Investigations,” p. 176.

17. Charles Schwartz, Ph.D., “The McMartin Preschool Osteological Remains” (2nd report), Archeological Investigations, June 15, 1990, p. 1.

–

Ray Buckey’s Press Corps and the Tunnels of McMartin – From: Psychic Dictatorship in the USA, Alex Constantine (Feral House, 1995).

A fusillade of press reports, OpEd Columns and television documentaries have dismissed the McMartin case as a “witch hunt” born of mass hysteria, coercive therapy, false memories and greed. Yet all seven jurors attending a press conference after the second trial raised heir hands when asked who among them believed children had been abused at the preschool. So why the call to public denial from the press?

After the initial flurry of press coverage of the McMartin Preschool molestation case, a number of sympathetic reporters and psychiatrists publicly exonerated Ray Buckey and his co-defendants. This observer’s gallery of “skeptics” also deny that ritual abuse is a social problem. The argument consistently leads to the lament that the McMartin allegations were incited by mass hysteria, an ambitious district attorney and an incompetent child therapist. The hysteria thesis, promoted by a small group of pedophile defense psychologists, mostly, has appeared in publications of stature including the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, Harper’s, New Yorker, Newsweek,. The McMartin case was the subject of an Oliver Stone cable feature.

Media boosters of the defense neglect to acknowledge the most damning evidence in the McMartin case. Instead, they explain away superficial, carefully-sifted pieces of the case. In preparation for the trial, 389 toddlers were interviewed – nearly all of them described abuse at the preschool, and do to this day. Some 80 percent had physical symptoms, including blunt force trauma of sexual areas, scarring, rectal bleeding and sexual diseases. Interestingly enough, skeptics of ritual abuse in the public print often have dubious bona fides themselves. Some even participate secretly in the pedophile and occult undergrounds, most notably a couple of Los Angeles writers who have written the only two book available on McMartin, taking mental health professionals, police, the press and prosecutors to task for pursuing false allegations of abuse.

The Politics of Child Abuse, by Paul and Shirley Eberle, purports to be something of a definitive investigation. A blurb for the book exults: “This has got to be one of the most devastating political detective stories of all time. The authors smashed open the child abuse witch-hunt so everyone can see it for what it is – the way it really happened, and why. Here is the amazing story, starting with the first spectacular accusations, the marathon pre-trial hearing, the endless series of false accusations.” Since the Eberles’ first McMartin book appeared in 19896, the Eberles have achieved national status as child abuse experts. In courts of law their work is frequently cited, and they lecture widely to receptive audiences.

The Eberles once appeared as featured speakers at a conference held by Victims of Child Abuse Laws (VOCAL), an organization that feted The politics of child Abuse as positively revelatory. But Paul and shirley Eberle can hardly be considered credible reporters. Blurbs in their own pornographic tabloid, L.A. Star, failed to mention that in the 1970s the authors once ran an underground tabloid for pedophiles in Los Angeles, Finger, which delved heavily into sadomasochistic sex, sex with children and sex acts involving human excrement. Finger contained sexual drawings by children and pedophile erotica, including “My First Rape,” “She was Only Thirteen,” “Sexpot at Five,” and “What Happens when Niggers Adopt White Children.” One issue featured a cover photo of two naked adults reclining amid a pile of inflated dolls. A letter to Finger declaimed: “I’m a pedophile and I think it’s great a man is having sex with his daughter…. Would like to see pics of nude girls making it with their daddy, but realize its too risky to print.”

The book’s publisher, Carole Stuart of Lyle Stuart & Co., told Ms. magazine that the Eberles have been “friends of the family for years.” In The Politics of Child Abuse, the Eberles claimed that since the McMartin arrests, “we have been barraged with hundreds of sexual abuse cases, in which many people have been sent to prison for staggeringly long terms on little or no evidence.” That the Eberles themselves remain at large would seem to contradict the notion that child abuse laws are stringently over-enforced. The Eberles attempt to portray every abuser as a victim of the justice system: We believe that every molestation case in which there has been a conviction should be reopened and reviewed. There is convincing evidence that innocent people have been imprisoned, that naive juries and judges were unable to believe the defendants would be brought to trial if no crime had occurred, and defense attorneys have not been allowed to bring all the pertinent facts before the public.

Los Angeles attorney Sally Dichter, in a book review, argued that the Eberles have “nothing to offer to any discipline.” The book she lamented, “is an attempt to vindicate every individual who has been convicted of child abuse.” Considering their credentials as child pornographers, of course the Eberles, as Dichter discovered, believe “every molestation case in which there has been a conviction should be reopened and reviewed.” Dichter found this point of view unbelievable: “The Eberles seem intent on convincing the reader that child abuse never occurs.” The authors “skepticism” of ritual child abuse is shared by Gerald Larue, professor emeritus of Biblical history and archeology at the University of Southern California. Larue is one of the principals behind the Noah’s Ark hoax, which culminated in February 1993 with a two-hour CBS prime-time special, “The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark, billed by CBS as a documentary. Scholars immediately denounced it. The network refused to retract.

Satanism in America, a book that Larue co-wrote, attributed the McMartin case to a “satanic panic” incited by wild-eyed “religious fanatics, opportunists and emotionally unstable survivors whose stories simply are not to be believed” —- an agonizing irony given Larue’s instigation of the Noah’s Ark hoax. He argues that the “child abuse hysteria sweeping the country us being fueled by people for whom facts have no meaning. They invent ‘facts.'”

Langley Connections and the Rise of the Child Abuse Backlash

Another “expert” who has dismissed McMartin as a classic witch-hunt is Dr. Douglas Besherov, once the director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. He is also a directory of the rabidly right-wing American Enterprise Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank To supplement his weighty credentials, Besherov writes for academic social and political quarterlies with long histories of collaborating with the CIA for propaganda purposes. He is a coeval of Irving Kristol, a veteran CIA psychological warfare specialist. In 1976, the Congressional Church committee hearings revealed that the CIA is deeply entrenched in the American press. Some 400 journalists, it emerged at the hearings, had collaborated with the Agency at least once. CIA propagandists like Besherov and Kristol provide others in the field with a scholastic support base, and mold opinion on campus. with such CIA-anchored academic journals as Encounter and The Public Interest, both edited by neo-con Kristol. In 1986, Public Interest published a monograph by Dr. Besherov entitled “Unfounded Allegations – A New Child Abuse Problem.” Besherov opens with the observation of legal scholar Sanford Katz that “the maltreatment of children is as old as recorded history. Infanticide, ritual sacrifice, exposure, mutilation, abandonment, brutal discipline and the near slavery of child labor have existed in all cultures.”

Dr. Besherov, left dry-eyed by such conditions, blamed the media and mandatory reporting laws for dragging child abuse out of the closet (where he seems to prefer it) and blowing the severity of the problem out of proportion. Besherov’s influential follow-up article, “Doing Something About Child Abuse: The Need to Narrow the Grounds for State Intervention,” was published in 1985 by Irving Kristol and the American Enterprise Institute. In it, Besherov argues that most allegations of child abuse are statistically unfounded. His slipshod use of statistics drove the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) to publicly find him responsible for leading the public “to believe that child abuse is leveling off or that, as reports increase, the level of substantiation decreases.” The CWLA notes that its survey results indicate a “substantial increase in reports,” and “a stable rate of confirmation,” directly contradicting Besherov’s statistical red herring. Turning to the children removed from their homes by social workers, Besherov states flatly: “According to data collected by the federal government, it appears that up to half of these children were in no immediate danger at home and could have been safely left there.”

The government “data” cited by Besherov derives from a study conducted by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. The authors of the study told New York Times reporter David Hechler that “the information is not there” to support Besherov’s assertion that half of all abused children left in the custody of their parents are in “no immediate danger.” “He has used our statistics in this case to prove a point when (he) simply can’t do it,” a Center researcher told Hechler. When asked for his response, the AEI scholar refused to comment. By fabricating statistics, Besherov reveals himself to be a propagandist. Have unfounded allegations led to a national McCarthyite frenzy, as Besherov contends? “I’m sure there are false allegations,,” concedes David Finkelhor, a sociologist specializing in child abuse. “I’m sure when people are caught up in false allegations it’s terrible.” But in criminal cases of all kinds, “there’s always the possibility of false allegations, and I don’t think they’re more severe in the area of child abuse that they are in — I want to say something innocuous – people making false allegations about having had money stolen from them, or false allegations of embezzlement.” Besherov’s work has given rise to such hysteria-producing diatribes as “False Accusations of Child Abuse: Could it Happen to You.” (Women’s Day, July 8, 1986), and “Invasion of the Child Savers: No One is Safe in the War Against Abuse” (Progressive, September, 1985) – both are adventures in hyperbole, like Besherov’s cooked statistics.

“Family abuse,” by A.C. Carlson, another protégé of Irving Kristol. appeared in Reason magazine, a publication that has frequently runs CIA disinformation. Hechler writes that Carlson has gone “even further than Besherov, inflating the unfounded rate beyond belief.” Erroneously, in fact, Carlson laments that “the victims pile up,” like corpses in a pile, and commiserates needlessly with “the sky-rocketing number of parents and teachers falsely accused of child abuse.”

Ritual abuse “skeptics” with CIA connections are covering up the latest phase in Agency-sponsored mind control experimentation. For thirty years Agency scientists have collaborated with cults (many of them founded by the government) to conceal the development of mind control technology. Jim Jones and the People’s Temple was one product of the alliance. McMartin was another. Both episodes have been buried in disinformation. The campaign to mislead the public about ritual abuse is ambitious, rivaling the campaign to conceal the facts in the murder of John F. Kennedy. The smokescreen is also explained in part by reports implicating the CIA in child prostitution for the purposes of political blackmail – a variation on the age-old sex trap. CIA agents have been directly involved in organized child sex rings. In Enslaved (1991), an investigation of the worldwide slavery underground, Gordon Thomas found Agency participation in the kidnap of Latin American children “flown across the border in light aircraft, and sold to child sex rings, or sold so their organs could be used in transplants.” Some of the pilots, Thomas discovered, “made two or three flights a day. The more experienced used Beech 18s because of the aircraft’s capacity and maneuverability. The majority of the fliers were mercenaries who had flown for the CIA.”

Ray Buckey’s father, Charles, worked for Hughes Aircraft. There is an old adage that holds “Hughes is the CIA.” Charles Buckey built the McMartin Preschool. According to carbon dating readings, the tunnels unearthed beneath the preschool were dug in 1968 – the year the school was built. Buckey Sr. testified on the stand that there were no tunnels. The media has been completely silent on this score, which brings us to…

The Tunnel Cover-Up

El Paso reporter Debbie Nathan, utterly convinced of the defendants’ innocence, entered the fray in The Village Voice, and has appeared in newspapers across the country, including The L.A. Weekly, Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She has been honored with the Free Press Association’s H. L. Mencken Award, and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism prize. She is a leading proponent of the “mass hysteria” thesis, the notion that many child abuse allegations are “unfounded.” Her cavalier dismissal is not supported by objective research. Dr. David Chadwick of San Diego’s childrens’ Hospital, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (May 26, 1989), contends that 8 percent of all abuse allegations are unfounded, at most, and are “rather easily distinguishable in a careful review.”

At times it is difficult to tell whether Nathan is a “skeptic” or an apologist of sexual abuse. “Most pedophilia,” she contends, “consists of caressing and fondling. for most children, these experiences appear to be at best confusing, at worst traumatic. But others seem to willingly participate, and some adults recall that while still legally minors they accepted, even welcomed, sex with grown-ups.” Nathan doesn’t condemn the abuser. After all, “compared to the abuses of a child protection movement gone mad, could incest be any worse?”

Alex Cockburn is a Nathan supporter, and has on occasion gotten caught up in her pro-pedophilic obfuscations, as in this diatribe from The Nation for March 8, 1993: As a Miami-based anthropologist, Rafael Martinez, consultant to the Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office, told Nathan, in traditional Latin American cultures “kissing and hugging is common with children up to three or four years old. It is common for females to kiss children all over the place – including on the genitals.

The practice of kissing children on the genitals may be traditional in some cultures, but it is frowned upon by the Manhattan Beach preschool licensing board. Alex Cockburn’s skepticism toward ritual abuse was summed up in an editorial appearing in the February 8, 1990 Wall Street Journal, “The McMartin Case: Indict the Children, Jail the Parents.” The son of a British spy, and a loquacious defender of the Warren Commission, Cockburn has such strong feelings about the McMartin case that he once publicly maligned an editor of the L.A. Weekly for refusing to print a recommendation that “the tots bearing false witness in the McMartin preschool case be jailed for perjury.”

His primary source on the subject of child abuse, Debbie Nathan, is herself something of a false witness. In ‘What McMartin Started: The Ritual Abuse Hoax” (Village Voice, June 12, 1990), Ms. Nathan moaned that “children at McMartin told of being molested in tunnels under the school. None were ever found, but until recently parents were still digging.” In fact, 30 days before Nathan’s article appeared, the tunnels were discovered beneath the preschool by scientists hired by the parents, confirming the testimony of the children. The project employed a team of archeologists from local universities, two geologists, a professional excavator, a carbon-dating specialist and a professional photographer to document the dig’s progress and findings. The longest tunnel was six feet beneath the preschool, running eastward 45 feet from the southwest wall, and ten feet along the north wall. The tunnel walls were held in place by support beams and a roof of plywood and tarpaper. A branch of the tunnel led to a nine-foot chamber (the “secret room” described by the children?). Another extended from the preschool to the triplex next door, surfacing beneath a roll-away bathtub. Forensic tests on thousands of objects found at the site – including two hundred animal bones – were conducted.

Until the tunnels were found, the L.A. Times covered the dig – with a smirk. The parents and scientists involved were portrayed as crack-pots – until the existence of the tunnels were substantiated by experts, at which time the newspaper abruptly stopped reporting the story. the public was left with the false impression that the search had failed. Critics of the excavation pointed out that District Attorney Ira Reiner had already searched for tunnels. At best, this is a half-truth. Reiner’s team tore up a bit of floor tile, but did not even bother to remove the glue that held it in place. The D.A.’s team, as it happens, dug up the lot next to the preschool, not underneath. “Actually,” McMartin mother Jackie MacGauley, who supervised the excavation, notes, “we were the first to dig on the property.” The search for the tunnels was undertaken with ground-penetrating radar to probe for inconsistencies in the soil. A bell-shaped area of disturbed earth was discovered along the foundation of the west wall. The tunnels beneath the opposite wall was unearthed (precisely where the children said it would be found all along) beneath the foundation. A [passage had been knocked through the concrete. “It was interesting,” MacGauley told L.A.’s Pacifica Radio, “because a lot of the child development specialists, psychiatrists and therapists across the country thought that it was some psychological phenomenon that the kids would talk about tunnels. Somehow that idea got ‘planted,’ and they had all these theories as to why all the kids would talk about something like this. It obviously couldn’t be true. And the district attorney at the time just flatly did not believe it, and really didn’t want to look.” Neither did the press.

A Cottage Industry of Child Abuse Debunkers

“MODERN WITCH-HUNT – CHILD ABUSE CHARGES” bawled a Wall Street Journal editorial for February 22, 1993. But the tone of the column was dry and high-toned. Dr. Richard Gardner, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, cautioned that “a great wave of hysteria” had gripped the country. In the early 90s, the mass hysteria premise was touted by big city newspapers and magazines of elite stature, all attempting to persuade – with evident bias and inflated “expert” opinion – that false child abuse charges were endemic. This school of disinformation coaxed public opinion with dire exhortations of a child abuse witch-hunt. In his Wall Street Journal comments, Dr. Gardner warned that a great wave of hysteria, “by far the worst” in history, the most devastating “with regard to the number of lives that have been destroyed and families that have been disintegrated.”

Gardner’s basic argument is that allegations of child abuse are often fabricated by parents embroiled in custody disputes – another explanation not supported by statistics, the ones Gardner ignores. One study found that a mere two percent of all abuse accusations stem from visitation and custody disputes. Other researchers have placed the percentage slightly higher.) As for “mass hysteria,” one of the earliest promoters of this thesis was Ralph Underwager, co-author with his wife, Hollida Wakefield, of Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse. “Few physicians will wish to invest the time and money ($70) to own or even read this book,” complained a reviewer for the Journal of the American Medical Association. “It is of little value to those who work with abused children except as it may be important to be aware of all points of view. The book will be doubtless be useful to attorneys defending persons accused of sexual abuse of children. It appears to have been written particularly for that audience…. The authors cite over 700 references, but they do not really review this body of literature. When a given reference fails to support their viewpoint, they simply misstate the conclusion.”

Since 1974, Dr. Underwager has been the director of the Institute for Psychological Therapies in Northfield, Minnesota. He has since been frequently called upon to provide expert testimony – in the late ’80s he spent 60-70 percent of his professional life shuttling between courtrooms. He is the author of numerous articles debunking the credibility of ritual abuse victims. Dr. Underwager has frequently been cited by Debbie Nathan as a leading authority on the subject. Lisa Manshel, author of Nap Time, an account of the New Jersey ritual abuse case, found that “child sexual abuse was not his field of knowledge,” but “it was his field of courtroom practice. He proliferated the opinion, ‘No one knows how to tell accurately whether a child’s been abused’ throughout the nation’s courts.” He has testified in most states, and by satellite in foreign countries, before at least 200 juries.” Dr. Underwager once stated on the stand that he considered it “more desirable that a thousand children in abuse situations are not discovered than for one innocent person to be convicted wrongly.” Dr. Underwager, a founder of the False Memory Syndrome foundation, is an ordained Lutheran minister. He believes, he once said in an interview appearing in an Amsterdam journal for pedophiles, , that sex with children is not only acceptable, but “God’s will.”

Q: Is choosing pedophilia for you a responsible choice for the individual?

Underwager: Certainly it is responsible. What I have been struck by as I have come to know more about and understand people who choose pedophilia is that they let themselves be too much defined by other people. That is usually an essential negative definition. Pedophiles spend a lot of time and energy defending their choice. I don’t think a pedophile needs to do that.

Underwager insisted that pedophiles “should attack the concept, the image, the picture of the pedophile as an evil, wicked and reprehensible exploiter of children.” Following the interview, Underwager was forced to resign as a founding member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (which is largely directed by CIA psychiatrists with backgrounds in mind control experimentation) The London Observer for December 12, 1993 reported that Dr. Underwager denied ever condoning sex with children. He added, however, that “scientific evidence” had demonstrated that “60 percent of women sexually abused as children reported that the experience was good for them. He contended the same could be true for boys involved with pedophiles..

The Descent of Mann

In a five-part series that appeared after the hung jury verdict of Ray Buckey’s first trial, Los Angeles Times reporter David Shaw found that the newspaper’s research files explained little of “the crucial behind-the-scenes role played by screenwriter Abby Mann.” Mann’s writing staff and circle of disinformationists have shaped public opinion on the McMartin case. Noel Greenwood, an L.A. Times editor, has described the wall of pro-Buckey PR thrown up by Mann and friends as “a mean, malevolent campaign conducted by people … whose motives are highly suspect and who have behaved in a basically dishonest … and dishonorable way.” Abby Mann, an Oscar recipient for a film about the Nazi war crimes trial, Judgment at Nuremburg (an oxymoron, since there was precious little justice at Nuremburg, a carefully-managed show trial that culminated with the execution of a small clutch of Nazis, minor prison terms for some – and recruitment of thousands of others by the CIA.) From the beginning, Mann was a vociferous advocate of the McMartin defendants. “We like to think we are different from Salem,” Mann sniffed at the resolution of Ray Buckey’s first trial. “I don’t believe that anything happened at that school.”

Abby Mann has worked diligently, largely back-stage, on behalf of Buckeys. It was Mann who first interested Sixty Minutes in the McMartin case. The November 2, 1986 broadcast was decidedly biased in favor of Ray Buckey. Defense attorney Danny Davis characterized the segment as “wholly sympathetic to the defense point of view.” Sixty Minutes led off with the camera panning a long couch and five of the original defendants. Mike Wallace asked: “Do these women look like child molesters?”

New York Times reporter David Hechler noted “gaping holes in the story. Why were no police or D.A.’s investigators interviewed or even mentioned? And if Ira Reiner believed the case was so weak against the five defendants, why did he wait until the five-month preliminary hearing was completed before dropping the charges? These questions were never asked.” The innocence of the defendants was assumed by Wallace and crew as a foregone conclusion, and the charges against them were framed as the aberrations of nattering lunatics. Most of the Sixty Minutes segment on McMartin was taped in Abby Mann’s living room. But heavily-biased media coverage was only one of the strategies quietly enacted by Abby Mann. When Deputy District Attorney Glenn Stevens was caught leaking information on the prosecution’s case to Mann, he was forced to resign. No charges were brought against him. From the Los Angeles Times. Gaining the confidence of the McMartin defendants, the Manns were ultimately hired as “investigators” for the defense. That and their earlier alliance with former prosecutor Glenn Stevens sparked charges from parents of alleged child molestation victims of a conspiracy to obstruct justice for monetary gain. After Los Angeles Tmes reporter Bob Williams met Abby Mann, he wrote a flurry of memos charging the coverage of Lois Timnick, the paper’s reporter on the McMartin beat, with extreme bias favoring the prosecution. The accusation was investigated by Noel Greenwood, the regional news editor at the Times. Greenwood concluded that it was Williams who’d acted with extreme bias, not Timnick. Greenwood’s memoes state that Williams’ memos were “reckless and irresponsible.” Williams had “undermined a fellow reporter and seriously harmed the credibility and effectiveness of the Times.” Williams was temporarily suspended without pay. Shortly thereafter, he went to work for Abby Mann. Williams surfaced next as a consultant to Mary Fischer, whose “A Case of Dominoes” in Los Angeles magazine drew upon the argument (first postulated by the child pornographers Paul and Shirley Eberle), that former District Attorney Robert Philobosian initiated the McMartin prosecution for political gain.

Fischer once admitted to the late Wayne Satz, the KABC television reporter who broke the McMartin story, that she wrote the article under the direction of Abby Mann. “There was never any case at all,” Fischer wrote with absolute certainty. “At the very least, it is a blueprint for preying on public fears.” Fischer has gone so far as to claim that therapists, parents and children attending McMartin masterminded a “conspiracy” to harass and imprison innocent people. When pressed on one occasion by Carol Hemingway, a Los Angeles talk show host, Fischer was unable to offer supporting evidence of conspiracy (as McMartin parents did), nor could she explain the motives of the conspirators. Fischer did her utmost to dismiss the medical evidence that molestation took place at the preschool. In October, 1988 the Los Angeles Times reported that medical examiners of the original 13 children scheduled to testify found “scars, tears, enlarged body openings or other evidence indicating blunt force trauma consistent with the repeated sodomy and rape they described.”

One of the children bled from the anus. Some contracted venereal infections. Yet Fischer found relevant the findings of a Fresno pediatrician who refused to testify at the first McMartin trial. The 1987 study, summarized by Fischer, concluded that “any kind of irritation – not just sexual abuse – may damage children’s genitals.” This reader, at least, was left to ponder forms of “irritation” that might leave the McMartin children with chlamydia, confirmed by medical examinations and difficult to explain away. Fischer’s follow-up McMartin story in Los Angeles for October, 1993 opined that a “hysterical tone” in press reports on McMartin was established by Wayne Satz. who died of heart failure in 1992, “causing some to speculate it was karma,” wrote Fischer, an ersatz and mean-spirited elegy. “I still don’t know how anyone could believe all that bull,” Virginia McMartin told her. “Especially with a school as wide open as ours and people coming and going at all times. Or who could actually believe there were tunnels.. (The archeological team that led the excavation – ignored by Fischer – could have given her a guided tour.) “It shows the power of the media.”

Apparently Abby Mann has a need for Ms. Fischer and the other writers in his employ. A best-selling Hollywood biographer (speaking on condition of anonymity) offers this insight into the career of Abby Mann. “He’s incapable of writing scripts himself. It’s true,” he said, “he can’t write. Abby keeps a fairly large stable of ghost writers to produce scripts in his name.” Who is Abby Mann? Mae Brussell, the late Carmel-based political researcher, speculated in a November, 1987 radio broadcast that Mann is a covert operator posing as a Hollywood progressive, plying extensive media connectioins to influence public opinion. Mann’s behind-the-scenes manipulations, ghosts and an exhaustive supply of funds and press contacts, support the hypothesis that Abby Mann is a media mole. Indictment, yet another disinformation effort supposedly written by Abby and Myra Mann, premiered on May 20, 1985 on HBO. The movie was produced and directed by Oliver Stone. As a political researcher, I had taken more than a passing interest in Stone’s film JFK, and couldn’t help but note that the media assault on Stone’s bore a resemblance to Mann’s campaign to discredit the McMartin children. The day after an announcement of the “secret” project already underway appeared in Variety, I contacted Stone’s office and spoke with Jean Marie Burke, a researcher for Ixtlan Productions, Stone’s company in Santa Monica. I informed Ms. Burke that much of the information about McMartin in the corporate media was disingenuous, beginning with the Eberles.

She brightened up. “Oh, the Eberles – I have their books right here!” She went silent when I told her that Paul and Shirley Eberle were child pornographers. I sent her a package of accurate information on the case by certified mail, then contacted her boss with a letter informing him simply that he had hold of a bad project, which had already been shot and was in the editing stage Stone wrote back, asking me to clarify. My response follows:

Mr. Stone: McMartin is poorly understood by most people because a disinformation gambit is afoot to discredit the children’s¹ testimony — a fusillade, in fact, similar to the one you were treated to after JFK. You asked me to clarify my objections. Consider how difficult it was to sort through and communicate the multitude of facts relevant to the killing of John Kennedy. And then recall how a carefully-conceived film on the assassination can be explained away with a glib “no evidence” from an Edward Epstein or Dan Rather. This is the problem I¹m up against with McMartin. There is a complex story behind the abuse — it involves CIA mind control experiments, and this is largely what the plants in the establishment press, and fronts like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, are concealing. (Nine out of ten psychiatrists in both the U.S. and Great Britain from large samplings believe ritual abuse to be a very real social problem. But the media inevitably talks only to the one of ten who deny, and many of those are experimental scientists on the CIA payroll.) You now find yourself on the same side (of the McMartin argument) as Alex Cockburn (you recall the knock-down-drag-out Nation debate with a leading progressive who rejects key crimes of government ((including the Kennedy assassination)) for high-toned, but ultimately silly reasons), Newsweek, etc. That alone should make you uncomfortable in the extreme. One of your researchers brightened up when I mentioned the only two books available on McMartin, both written by Paul and Shiirley Eberle. She knew those books inside out. The problem is, the Eberles published child pornography in the 1970s — garishly packaged in an underground rag called Finger — featuring adults having sex with children, children with excrement smeared on them, children in lewd positions and posing provocatively. This ludicrous pedophile sheet ran stories with such unsavory testimonials as “She was Only Thirteen,” “What Happens when Niggers Adopt White Children,” “My First Rape,” and so on. Don¹t bother to read the McMartin books, if you haven¹t already. Each page is full of factual errors and conscious distortions. Your movie will perpetuate the Eberles’ disinformation. But the LA Times will love it. (Buffy Chandler told a source of mine, in a moment of rage at her family, that her parents (the owners of the L.A. Times) funded weird genetic experiments years ago. This is no more bizarre than some of the things done in pre-schools around the country, and may explain the newspaper¹s change of attitude after the initial reporting.)

But Noel Greenwood, a Times editor, knew what he was talking about when he said there is a “mean-spirited campaign” in play to slant the truth about McMartin. Abby Mann is a key proponent. His attorney threatened to sue if I didn’t retract my comments when an early version of my research appeared several years ago. I did not retract. In fact, the newspaper, Random Lengths in Long Beach, backed me. Others appearing in the story threatened me. They did not sue. Why not? They made such a noise. Now they are the sources of your movie, still making noise about “innocence abused,” and it¹s hollow.

They contend there is no evidence that children were abused at McMartin. On the contrary, there is an abundance of evidence. But the DA had no real intention of gathering it. Neither did the press. Same as JFK, eh? The CIA connection to cults around the country began in 1963. The story was told by a Berkeley psychologist in a thesis entitled “The Penal Colony,” which was presented at a psychiatric conference in San Francisco by Congressional aide Joe Holsinger after Leo Ryan was killed at Jonestown. The hybrid was conceived because people were asking questions about experiments at McGill, the University of Pennsylvania, John Hopkins, UCLA, Honeywell, NASA and other haunts of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control fraternity. Jonestown was one product of the association. Another, more recent example was the Solar Temple killings in Switzerland. The British press reported that this cult was running arms to Australia and South America, and laundering the proceeds at BCCI. The American press couldn’t find this information. What does this tell you?

Buckey Sr. testified that he did not have tunnels dug beneath the preschool. Why would anyone do that? Five scientists have put their reputations on the line to confirm that there are tunnels. One, a carbon-dating specialist, discovered that the tunnels were excavated in 1968. That was the year the preschool was built. It was built by Charles Buckey. He lied on the stand. The kids gave fairly accurate descriptions of the tunnels. Did Abby?

Regards, Alex Constantine

Despite this protest, and threats of a boycott of HBO from children’s advocacy groups around the country, Indictment aired anyway. The movie simply reinforces the many misconceptions the public has been force-fed since Abby Mann became involved in the case. The Most Hated Man at the L.A. Times In January, 1990, after the anti-climactic, deadlocked verdict of the second trial, the Los Angeles Tmes ran a four-part series by media critic David Shaw, trashing the paper’s own coverage of the McMartin case. Shaw described press coverage of the case as a “media feeding frenzy” ranking with exposes of Gary Hart, Oliver North and Dan Quayle. “More than most big stories,” Shaw explained, “McMartin at times exposed basic flaws in the way the contemporary news organizations function. Pack journalism. Laziness. Superficiality.” Daily newspaper coverage, he argued, was contaminated by “cozy relationships with prosecutors,” and a competitive furor “that sends reporters off in a frantic search to be the first with the latest shocking alllegation.”

Shaw’s McMartin series won the Times its 18th Pulitzer, but few reporters attended the champagne party thrown in his honor. “Most people don’t like him,” Times staffer Lee Dye told a reporter for Los Angeles magazine. “He really is disliked at the Times,” said restaurant critic Ruth Reichl. Bill Boyarsky, another staffer, says “everyone around me hates him.” The harshest opinion of Shaw came from the late Glenn Binford, the paper’s late night editor at the city desk, who refers to Shaw as “an oily little prick.” The nickname stuck. “Even the late Dial Torgerson,” reported Los Angeles, “a droll, dry-witted newsman’s newsman … adopted the moniker, though it was uncharacteristic of Torgerson to disparage anyone.” Reporters for the “Metro” section particularly harbor a keen disdain for David Shaw.

Why is so much animosity directed his way? Most of Shaw’s colleagues at the Times feel that he receives special treatment. He is contracted to write a mere four stories a year. He moonlights as the monthly “Dining Out” columnist for GQ magazine. As the official ombudsman of the Times, one reporter complains, “Shaw plays favorites and purposefully ducks anything that may really irritate his superiors, tending instead to aim at those with no actual power.”

One of his primary targets is staff writer Lois Timnick and Cathleen Decker, whose McMartin coverage was hardly “frantic” or “superficial.” Shaw’s depiction of them as reportorial McCarthyites is not borne out by a review of the newspaper’s McMartin coverage, and the air around Times Mirror Square has, since his series appeared, been thick with acrimony. A week before Shaw received the Pultizer, Timnick (who has since stopped talking to him) threatened to organize an office “suicide party” if he won. When he did walk away with an award, the Pulitzer committee stated that it was given to Shaw not on the merits of his writing, but because the Times permitted him to criticize the paper’s own coverage of a landmark trial. Shaw was born on an Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. He was educated at Pepperdine and UCLA. His career took off when, as a reporter for the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, he published a scalding investigative story on Max Rafferty, the Republican opponent of Alan Cranston for a Senate seat. Shaw’s five-part series killed Rafferty’s political prospects with allegations of draft dodging. Shaw received an award from the Los Angeles Press Club for the story, and a job offer from the Times.

That was 18 years ago. He was informally assigned to “the sex beat.” Shaw plied his investigative skills with titillating exposes of massage parlors and strip clubs. His piece on a nightspot featuring live sex with a dog threw the newsroom into turmoil – this is the same commentator who later dismissed most press coverage of McMartin as “sensational” and “superficial.” Shaw defines himself publicly as a “liberal,” but he frequently expresses right-wing sentiments, and his writing can be fairly summed up as propagandistic. He chose to write on McMartin, Los Angeles magazine reported, “because he needed an excuse to stay in town. ‘My wife was eight months pregnant, and I was looking for a story that would keep me in L.A. so I would be here for the birth.”

“Experts” on the McMartin debacle – Shaw, the Eberles, Dr. Underwager, Abby Mann, and others – have, in violation of their own admonitions, retired it in the press. Ray Buckey is supposed to be as innocent as Ceasar’s wife. If so, why do Buckey’s supporters ignore critical evidence? Why the statistical fabrications? Why lament repeatedly that the case took five years to try when dragging it out was a conscious defense strategy? Why ignore the tunnels and the bones? And, most troubling off all, why has so much effort been put into propagating mass deception on Buckey’s behalf?

Cult and Ritual Abuse – It’s History, Anthropology, and Recent Discovery in Contemporary America – Noblitt and Perskin – Prager (2000) p. 141 – 142 (1995 book – p.184 2000 book) “The McMartin Case is also the subject of the cable movie, Indictment, produced by Home Box Office. Several children’s advocacy groups have expressed concerns that the film’s focus appears to be slanted in favor of the accused perpetrators. The newsletter for the organization, Believe the Children, contains an impassioned plea to its readers to relinquish their subscriptions to Home Box Office (HBO) in protest of the film’s airing. An article featured in the newsletter entitled “Sex Abuse, Lies and Videotape”(1995) describes the genesis of the program and voices its concerns that the true victims of the McMartin case, the children, might be damaged by the perspective of the film’s author, Abby Mann. According to the article, Mann and his wife, Myra, became advocates of the operators and staff of the McMartin preschool during the course of their trial. Because of the Mann’s involvement in the case and their relationship to the accused perpetrators, the article expressed the concern that the film might reflect an unbalanced portrait of accused and accusers such that roles might be reversed in the eyes of the viewing public. This has, in fact, been proven to be a correct assumption. Reviews of the cable movie featured in magazines such as Time (Bellafante, 1995) and TV Guide (McDougal, 1995) on the film’s depiction of an overzealous prosecuting attorney, a mentally unbalanced parent of a child victim, and a punitive therapist all lend themselves to the perpetuation of the ideas that the true victims are the alleged perpetrators. Ironically, this film also casts the media in an unfavorable light implying that the media’s over-the-top reporting of the event led to a veritable witch hunt.”

“The movie “The Indictment,” produced for Home Box Office, about the McMartin trial, was criticized by several children’s advocacy groups for being slanted in favor of the accused perpetrators. According to an article featured in the newsletter “Sex Abuse, Lies and Videotape,” (1995) the film’s author Abby Mann and his wife Myra became advocates of the operators and staff of the McMartin preschool during the McMartin trial. The article expressed the concern that the film might reflect an unbalanced portrait of accused and accusers such that roles might be reversed in the eyes of the viewing public. This has been proven to be a correct assumption.”

Chronology of the McMartin Preschool Abuse Trials

May 1983 Judy Johnson enrolls her 2 1/2-year-old son at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.

June, July 1983 Judy takes her son to a pediatrician because he was complaining about his bottom hurting. The doctor has no specific diagnosis. The next time the child complained of having a lot of pain, she took him to a different doctor. Again the doctor had no explanation. In fairness there was virtually no information on the symptoms of sexual abuse of small children at that time.

August 12, 1983 Judy was shopping at a grocery store with her son in the cart when he complained again of severe pain. Judy checked his diaper and found blood.

She went to yet another respected local pediatrician and he diagnosed the boy as having been sodomized. The doctor, mandated to report cases of child sexual abuse, reports the case to authorities.

August 18, 1983 Judy Johnson meets with Detective Jane Hoag to be interviewed about her son’s symptoms for the investigation.

August 30, 1983 As requested, Johnson takes her son with her to the police station for another interview. He is 2 years and 8 months old. He names Ray Buckey.

September 9, 1983 Police Chief Harry Kuhlmeyer sends out a letter to 200 McMartin Preschool parents informing them that Ray Buckey is

suspected of child abuse and asking them for information. As other victims come forward, an unspecific list of suspected street blocks

and areas in town is circulated.

September 15, 1983 Ray Buckey is arrested on suspicion of child molestation but released soon after.

October 17, 1983 The District Attorney’s Office asks Kee MacFarlane, a consultant for the Children’s Institute International, to interview

child sex abuse victims who attended the school.

November 1983 Children’s Institute International interviewers begin diagnosing former students of the McMartin Preschool as having been sexually

abused. Dr. Astrid Heger does medical examinations with an innovative diagnostic tool called the culposcope. This microscopic examination technique allows slide pictures to be taken of minute scarring caused by penetration.

December 1983 One of the teachers, and defendant Babette Spitler, is promoted to director of the McMartin preschool in Peggy McMartin’s

place. Ms Spitler begs the parents to keep the children in the school and refer the school to others as well.

January 13, 1984. Virginia McMartin Preschool shut down after 28 years in business. The first McMartin Preschool located 1 mile west and this

second school were in operation totaling over 37 years. Virginia kept records on file cards of over 3,000 former and current students.

February 2, 1984 KABC reporter Wayne Satz shocks television viewers with reports of a massive child abuse scandal at the McMartin

Preschool.

February 1984 Seven defendants are arrested and charged with 207 counts of child molestation and conspiracy. Over 90 McMartin parents, file a civil suit against Virginia McMartin, Peggy Buckey, Betty Raidor, Babette Spitler, Peggy Ann Buckey and Ray Buckey for assault and battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress with one attorney. Others file suit with other attorneys. All suits are eventually dropped by civil attorneys after the 6 year statute of

limitations expired before the trial ended. Civil suits by families are never refiled.

March 11, 1984 A number of other daycare centers in the Los Angeles area are closed by the California State Department of Public Social

Services. Ten additional schools are closed in the South Bay area.

March 22, 1984 Teachers Peggy Buckey, Virginia McMartin, Ray Buckey, Peggy Ann Buckey (Ray’s sister), Mary Ann Jackson, Betty Raidor, and

Babette Spitler are indicted on 115 counts of child sexual abuse.

April 2, 1984 The L. A. Times reports that students at McMartin have been fondled, raped, drugged, photographed nude, forced to witness

animals being slaughtered and threatened to keep silent.

May 23, 1984 The prosecution files 93 new counts. The indictment count reaches 208, involving 40 alleged child victims.

Fall 1983 to March 1984 Nearly 400 children were interviewed at Children’s Institute International. Forty-one children are listed as victims in a

complaint filed by the State. The count of those diagnosed as sexually abused reaches 360 students. DA Robert Philibosian announces the 1976 Karen Klass murder case will be reexamined to determine if it could be linked to the McMartin case. Klass was the ex wife of Righteous Brother Bill Medley. She had been

murdered approximately an hour after leaving her 5 year old son at the pre school. Klass’ husband also died shortly after the McMartin

indictments in March 1984. His death was ruled an accident after he drove off a mountain road one afternoon in Oregon.

March 22, 1984, Los Angeles Grand Jury issues indictment charging 7 former teachers with 115 counts

April 7, 1984 Bail revoked for 5 defendants who had been free on bail when 400 additional sex acts are presented.

May 1984 Arsonist attempts to burn down the empty cinder block preschool building, causing over $10,000 in damage. The room where

children identified the entrance to the tunnels, the “C” Charlie room was most badly destroyed. The classrooms are repainted, new furniture

is built and trees trimmed in time for the jury to tour the site.

May 24, 1984 An additional 92 counts of child molestation are filed against all 7 defendants. A charge of conspiracy to commit lewd and

lascivious acts by force or threat of force on a child under 14. Count is now 207 against 42 children.

June 8, 1984 Preliminary hearing begins.

June 1984 Bail for Peggy Buckey is set at $1 million; Ray Buckey continues to be held without bail.

July 12, 1984 A Federal Grand Jury is impaneled to begin its own investigation of the case.

August 8, 1984 Prosecutor Lael Rubin announces that the seven McMartin teachers committed 397 sexual crimes, in addition to the 115 for which

they already faced charges.

August 17, 1984 Preliminary hearing begins. The pretrial begins with Judge Aviva Bobb and prosecutors Lael Rubin, Glenn Stevens and

Christine Johnston.

October 26, 1984 Judge Aviva Bobb consolidates hearing for Buckey and six others. There are 7 defense attorneys one for each of the 7 defendants. Any objection by defense can be (and are) repeated 7 times. Each objectionhas to be argued separately, enormously extending courtroom time used

by the defense.

November 1, 1984 Sheriff Sherman Block announces that the Sheriff’s Department will enter into the investigation and be responsible for

allegations in relation to the operation of the McMartin preschool which are not part of the current court case. The number of “Uncharged

suspects” is estimated at 85+.

January 7, 1985 Doctor Astrid Heger testifies that she found physical evidence of sexual assaults on 33 of the child witnesses.

March 1985 A group of nearly 50 McMartin Preschool parents arrive at the lot adjacent to the school formerly used as a play yard for the

school and begin searching for the tunnels many of the children talked about. A dead turtle is found with roots growing up through its

shell. The District Attorney is called immediately. A few days later, an archeological firm, SRS, hired by the District Attorney’s Office begins its own dig. Using the Geonics EM31Terrain Conductivity meter, the side lot is searched no more than 6 inches in depth. The team never entered the preschool building. Several turtles and other animal remains were found.

March 6, 1985 Judy Johnson was put on 72 hour watch at a hospital. She is released with no diagnosis of any mental disorder.

April 29, 1985 An increasing number of suspected perpetrators have been probed by detectives since September of 1984. Fifty additional

individuals are placed under investigation. A special elite task force consisting of 21 detectives and prosecutors is formed by the Los

Angeles County Sheriff’s Department by Chief Sherman Block and headed by Lieutenant Richard Wiley to look at these and other “uncharged

suspects. Investigations of 5 preschools in the area are not expected to produce any arrests for over a year. “Under the current legal system, we cannot file criminal actions because of their age and inability to qualify in a court system,” states Wiley.

May 18, 1985 Governor signs SB46 giving judges the discretion to use closed circuit testimony for child victims of sexual abuse. This law

years later passes the Supreme Court and becomes national law.

June 11, 1985 Judge Bobb rules that child witnesses will not be allowed to use the new statute allowing child victims of abuse to

testify over closed circuit TV. The prosecution immediately announced that it would not call any of its remaining witnesses. Only 5 of those

28 were willing to testify at all and then only by way of closed circuit TV. Six other witnesses dropped out because Rubin said they

could not withstand even the protective TV procedure. The remaining 16 witnesses had been withdrawn by their parents after they saw the

effects of lengthy cross-examination on the early witnesses. This reduces the number of witnesses from 43 to 13 and, as a result,

the reduces the number of counts.

June 14, 1985 Prosecutors add an additional 50 counts raising the number to 241 counts.

January 1986 Prosecutor Glenn Stevens is ordered to hand in his resignation form the District Attorney’s office after he is caught lying to his superiors about leaking information to the media.

January 9, 1986 Judge Aviva Bobb orders all 7 defendants held over to Superior Court trial with 135 counts of molestation and conspiracy. Thirteen of

the 41 child original witnesses remain. The cost of the 18 month hearing was estimated at $4 Million. The indictment had been 115 counts. Ultimately 20 counts were added.

January 17, 1986 Before the case is assigned to a trial judge and after loosing 28 witnesses because of brutal defense tactics during

the pretrial weakened the case, District Attorney Ira Reiner decides to drop charges against five of the seven defendants. Reiner tells

parents that Betty Raidor has enough remaining counts to face trial, but says he thinks she would not fit in prosecuting mother and son,

Peggy and Ray Buckey. The two are prosecuted on 79 counts and 20 counts, respectively, of child sexual abuse.

January 23, 1986 Peggy Buckey is released on $295,000 bail after bail is reduced from $495,000.

August 1986 Former prosecutor Glenn Stevens contracts with screenwriter Abby Mann to do a book and a movie in which he would be

portrayed as an ambitious attorney whose conscious got the better of him. Voluminous transcripts of Steven’s taped interviews at Mann’s

Beverly Hills Mansion were transcribed. Stevens accuses Rubin of being a liar and DA Philibosian of playing up the publicity. Mann goes to

the defense and asks to be hired as an investigator so the information can be included in the trial. The trial stops while these allegations

are reviewed. Stevens also jokes about Judy’s dog being sodomized and says she is a “banana boat.” Judy was never diagnosed with any mental illness

despite having been on a 72 hour watch at UCLA County Hospital. Eventually, Mann produces the information he gathers from the McMartins and defense attorneys into the movie `Indictment.’

December 19, 1986 Judy Johnson is found dead at 2:45 PM in her Manhattan Beach house by police after concerned neighbors called. Judy

died before having a chance to testify at the trial

April 20, 1987 Jury selection for the Superior court trial begins. Ray Buckey and his mother Peggy face 100 counts. Ninety-nine counts of child

molestation and 1 count of conspiracy.

January 13, 1987 Opening statements begin.

July 29, 1987 First parent testifies.

August 1987 The first victim witness, a girl now age 12, takes the stand as a witness for the prosecution.

October 12, 1987 Judge Pounders dismisses 27 of the 100 counts. Some parents, again refuse to let their children testify under adverse conditions.

December 10, 1987 Retired former police investigator Paul Bynum is called to testify at the trial by prosecutor Lael Rubin. The morning he was to appear, a juror’s home was burglarized and Bynum’s testimony was rescheduled for the next morning. Bynum was found dead by his wife at 5:45 that morning, shot in the head by a .38 caliber pistol. Bynum had conducted the first search for evidence at the preschool site in 1984 at the request of Ray Buckey. “None of the half dozen people questioned who were close to Bynum could think of any reason why his involvement in the case might have driven him to suicide,” reported Kevin Cody of the Easy Reader in Manhattan Beach. “Paul was kind of a worrier,” said Stephen Kay, a deputy district attorney and friend of the Bynum family, “but there was no hint of suicide. He was very upbeat about his wife and new daughter, both of whom he adored.”

October 19, 1988 The defense opens its case after 61 witnesses have finished testifying for the prosecution.

December 1988 Paul and Shirley Eberle, prolific pornographers of the 1970s (Finger magazine) and editors of the pornographic tabloid, LA Star, publish The

Abuse of Innocence, their version of the trial thus far.

February 15, 1989 Ray Buckey is released from jail on $1.5 million bond.

February 1989 Ray Buckey is released on bail after spending five years in jail.

May 16, 1989 Peggy Buckey takes the stand in her own defense and vigorously denies all allegations.

July 26, 1989 Ray Buckey takes the stand and denies he molested children.

July 27, 1989 Danny Davis, Ray Buckey’s attorney tops the list as the highest paid court appointed attorney at $509,340.00 for the 1986-87 fiscal year.

November 2, 1990, Jurors begin deliberations.

January 18, 1990 The jury returns its verdict in the first McMartin trial. Peggy and Ray Buckey are acquitted on 52 counts. The jury deadlocks on 13 counts, all against Ray Buckey. The jurors are polled and say they believe molestation took place at the preschool but that the prosecution did not prove the case. The expressed disappointment at not hearing more from the children.

January (late) 1990 District Attorney Reiner announces that he will retry Ray Buckey on eight of the 13 counts involving three girls.

February 5, 1990 Deputy District Attorneys Joe Martinez and Pam Ferraro are assigned to the case. Incredibly, after the trial, it is discovered that Pam Ferraro was a former student of the McMartin Preschool. Photographs of her sitting on Peggy Buckey’s lap reading a book, sitting at a table with Peggy, Virginia and several of other students as well as a McMartin preschool class picture including Peggy and Virginia.

April May, 1990 Tunnels are found under the foundation of the McMartin preschool building by a team of Archaeologists headed by Dr. Gary Stickel. Ground Penetrating Radar recently developed by the U.S. Army is used to define the location of anomalies under ground. Three segments of tunnel, one over 45 feet in length with a 9′ x 9′ room area are found exactly where the children said they were. District Attorney does not use the evidence because of time and money

constraints and the fact that they would have to start a new investigation of their own at the site as they did in 1985. The discoveries are widely reported in the news.

May 30, 1990 With the entire team of archaeologists, geologists still uncovering evidence of filled in tunnels, the McMartin Preschool is demolished by a bulldozer ordered by the new owner, developer, Arnold Goldstein. Final cost of the archaeological project, paid for by parents and donations, exceeds $53,000.

June 8, 1990, 83 year old Virginia McMartin takes the stand at her grandson’s retrial and after only 10 minutes and several outbursts in front of the jury, testimony is halted. A year earlier when she testified in front of Judge Pounders her testimony ended in the same outrageous manner. Judge Pounders had threatened to have her jailed, but later declared her medically infirm.

July 2-3 1990 Lawyers present closing arguments.

July 27, 1990 On their 15th day of deliberations, the jury tells the judge they are hopelessly deadlocked on all 8 counts. The judge declares a mistrial.

Juror L. I., a 64 year old treasury department employee said , “I don’t know how you could get 12 people to be unanimous in this case. There are too many unanswered questions. Too much time has passed.” Again because of money and time constraints, DA Ira Reiner decides not to ask for a third trial of Ray Buckey. The first two prosecutions have consumed over $15 million and seven years of court time. He is under tremendous political pressure because he has failed in prosecuting the case.

May 1991 Parent is ordered to pay one dollar each to McMartin defendants after they sue him for defamation of character. They had asked for $500,000 each.

1995 Virginia McMartin dies at age 88. HBO shows a docudrama, “The Indictment,” written by McMartin sympathizer Abby Mann and starring

James Wood. The McMartins are paid over $75.000 each for their version of the story. Mann wins an award for his work. Oliver Stone had

originally backed the project but minimized his involvement after public outrage. By 2000, Betty Raidor and Peggy McMartin Buckey die also.

1996 Single mother Jackie M. who saw the archaeological investigation of the school site to its conclusion commissions the archaeologist,

Dr. E. Gary Stickel to write a formal report. All other professionals involved cooperate in gathering facts and assisting Dr. Stickel in composing a formal report.

1998 Formal report of the Archaeological Investigation at the McMartin Preschool is completed at the cost of $3,000. Jackie and the archaeologist present the findings at the APSAC (American Professional Society Against Abuse of Children), Children’s Hospital Conference in San Diego, California

–

Archaeological Investigations of the McMartin Preschool Site (http://web.archive.org/web/20010406130849/http://members.cruzio.com/~ratf/McMartIntro.html)

Introduction by Santa Cruz Ritual Abuse Task Force

Have you heard of the McMartin case? Most people know something about the story. In 1983, hundreds of kids disclosed to their parents and therapists that they were abused at the prestigious McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. Seven people were arrest and charged with hundreds of counts of child sexual abuse, setting off the longest and most expensive trial in U.S. History (7 years-$20,000).

The defense claimed that the kids hadn’t really been abused, but that their memories were implanted by a conspiracy of witchhunting therapists. It was a successful tactic and all of the accused were let go.

Well, the kids memories weren’t implanted. Many of the kids consistently talked about tunnels under the pre-school where they were taken, sexually abused, and witnessed terrifying events such as animals being killed. The defense called these accusations “bizarre” and claimed they were proof that the children were wrong.

But the truth is that the tunnels are there. In fact they are more than just there. The tunnels are extensive, include a large room just as the children said, and lead to further sites off the property. The tunnels were found in an archeological dig under the pre-school conducted by Dr. E. Gary Stickel, archaeologist and director of Environmental Research Archaeologists, a Scientific Consortium.

You probably haven’t heard of these tunnels. Debbie Nathan, a journalist who made her career by ridiculing evidence of ritual abuse, ignored the archeological investigation entirely in her in her book Satan’s Silence which talked extensively about the McMartin case. HBO’s television movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial portrays the entire community as hysterical with no mention that the tunnels were found. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation Newsletter has claimed outright that no tunnels were ever uncovered, even though members of the board of directors have copies of the full report.

So here it is, the summary of the Archeological Investigation of the McMartin Pre-School Site. The full report is currently looking for a publisher. If you are interested in publishing this work, please contact the task force.

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Archaeological Investigations of the McMartin Preschool Site, Manhattan Beach, California

(http://web.archive.org/web/20010123212200/members.cruzio.com/~ratf/McMartin.html/)

Executive Summary

During the month of May 1990 an archaeological project was conducted at the McMartin Preschool site to determine, once and for all, whether or not there had ever been tunnels under the building, as described by various children. Excavation was carried out according to established scientific conventions with a careful research design defining what might prove or disprove the existence of “an underground feature that would connect to the surface of the site and extend underground for some distance. ” [with] dimensions large enough to accommodate adult human movement through it”. (p. 24)

The project unearthed not one but two tunnel complexes as well as previously unrecognized structural features which defied logical explanation. Both tunnel complexes conformed to locations and functional descriptions established by children’s reports. One had been described as providing undetected access to an adjacent building on the east. The other provided outside access under the west wall of the building and contained within it an enlarged, cavernous artifact corresponding to children’s descriptions of a “secret room”.

Both the contour signature of the walls and the nature of recovered artifacts indicated that the tunnels had been dug by hand under the concrete slab floor after the construction of the building. Whatever the purpose of this elaborate enterprise, even more effort must have been devoted to filling the tunnels back in and trying to conceal any evidence of their existence. Much of the fill dirt used for packing the tunnel spaces was mixed with historic debris, as if to mimic the surrounding terrain.

Not only did the discovered features fulfill the research prequalifications as tunnels designed for human traffic, there was also no alternative or natural explanation for the presence of such features.

Background

The McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California was the first of what has since been described as a national epidemic of multi-victim, multi-perpetrator accusations of sexual and sadistic abuse which erupted in the mid 1980’s. The McMartin case was encumbered with hundreds of charges against seven defendants and dozens of uncharged suspects. It became the longest, most expensive and arguably most controversial criminal trial in American history. The descriptions given by children to investigators and parents were unusual and unprecedented as they emerged in 1983, but they became so stereotypic to subsequent cases throughout the country as to become generic of presumed “ritual abuse”. Accusations of such extreme cruelty and bizarre perversity in the absence of physical evidence or obviously deranged suspects led eventually to increasing skepticism that such crimes could possibly exist. Simple alternative explanations emerged, first as criminal defense theories and then as common wisdom: very young children were moved by the hysterical overreaction of various adults to make unfounded accusations. Full-page newspaper ads placed in 1984 by McMartin criminal defense attorneys raised the specter of the Salem witch trials. The witch hunt analogy has since flourished to create substantial public distrust of preschool-age witnesses and of the adults who question them.

The failure of prosecutors to obtain even a single conviction in the McMartin trial has been taken by many as proof that the children’s allegations were merely fantastic. Various journalists have demanded punishment of the professionals and parents who had chosen to believe them. Similar allegations arising more recently in other cases in the United States and abroad are tested against the McMartin standard, creating a prejudice against investigating or substantiating even remotely “bizarre” complaints. Parents in such cases feel triply betrayed: first with the dreadful discovery of abuse; second with their abandonment by law enforcement, and third with being blamed for imagining the abuse and fomenting public hysteria.

One of the supposedly bizarre aspects of the McMartin case was the children’s insistence that they were taken into underground tunnels. They explained that the tunnels led to an underground “secret room” where abuse occurred, as well as providing a route for subversive transport to off-site locations for sexual exploitation. These stories were apparently considered fantastic by investigators, who made no attempt to search beneath the building.

A group of parents forced the hand of the district attorney on March 17, 1985 by initiating an excavation in the adjacent lot. The district attorney then authorized an archaeological inspection of that lot by Scientific Resource Surveys Inc. (SRS). There was no exploration beneath the slab floor. Instrumental survey with a terrain conductivity meter failed to detect alterations under the concrete. The SRS technician informed the district attorney’s investigator that the meter proved useless within the structure because of excessive interference from pipes and steel reinforcement. The preemptory conclusion at that time that there were no tunnels has become gospel among detractors of the McMartin families. Influential journalists ridicule parents for ever entertaining such a possibility and mock their subsequent attempts at exploration.

The first opportunity for private exploration came in April 1990 when the property was sold. Several parents obtained permission from the new owner to search for the tunnels. After cutting out a section of concrete and coming up with ambiguous findings, it became apparent that experienced supervision was needed. Gerald Hobbs, a professional miner, was engaged to insure safety and to better define the nature of the underground artifacts. When an apparent tunnel entrance was discovered and then verified by geologist Dr. E. Don Michael, parents sought out the archaeological team that completed the present project.

Method

The project was designed and conducted by E. Gary Stickel, Ph.D., on the recommendation of Rainer Berger, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the Interdisciplinary ?Program of the Archaeology Department at UCLA. Dr. Stickel is director of Environmental Research Archaeologists, a Scientific Consortium(ERA).

Several areas of the preschool site were designated and mapped as units for scientific excavation. These were selected according to differing criteria: re-exploration of sites documented in the district attorney’s SRS survey, children’s reports of entrance locations, anomalies detected through instrumental survey by ground penetrating radar (GPR), and the sites of significant discovery under Mr. Hobbs’ supervision.

Hypotheses and Test Expectations

The primary research problem was to determine whether or not there were a tunnel(s) and an underground room(s) at the site in question. To meet the test hypotheses, a tunnel would be an underground feature that would connect to the surface of the site and extend underground for some distance, possibly (but not necessarily) connecting to an underground room(s). It would have to have dimensions large enough to accommodate adult human movement through it. Such a tunnel on the subject property could have been constructed in two ways: 1) either dug out as a trench-like opening which would then be roofed over with wood and/or other materials and covered over with fill above to make a true tunnel (as opposed to an open trench), or 2) would be dug out completely underground, which would then leave a “ceiling” over its passageway formed of the naturally deposited soil. If the latter were the case, such a tunnel may or may not have been fitted with an underground “roof” of wood and/or other materials either to reinforce the strength of the “ceiling” of the tunnel or to keep loose soil and dust from falling down on people using it. In either scenario (l or 2) such a tunnel may have had posts of wood and/or other materials (e.g. iron) to serve as shoring reinforcements.

Thus, given the operational definition of a tunnel considered here, the following hypothesis and test expectations were considered (test expectations are specific, tangible data that are to be expected and are discoverable if the hypothesis is valid; Stickel, 1979).

If a tunnel(s) were present at the McMartin Preschool site, then the following test expectations should be present:

1. An opening(s) (entrance and/or exit) large enough for human passage should be present permitting access from the surface down into a tunnel feature.

2. Tunnel architecture should be linear or curvilinear (i.e. an elongated passageway leading in a definable direction(s).

3. Tunnel architecture (especially depth or height and width) should be large enough to accommodate adult human passage.

4. The walls and/or uncovered soil ceiling of the tunnel should have “signatures” of markings indicating whether the tunnel had been dug by hand and/or by a machine (e.g. a backhoe).

5. There should be a compacted dirt floor (compacted by human foot traffic) distinguishable from surrounding non-tunnel soil which should not be compacted.

6. The tunnel could be open (i.e. traversable and unfilled).

7. The tunnel may be naturally (i.e. natural processes of erosion and soil redeposition) or artificially (by human action) filled in with soil. Such fill should be distinguishable from the natural soil matrix of the site in terms of color and/or by texture, and compaction (i.e. would be less compact than the soil forming the tunnel’s walls, floor and ceiling).

8. The tunnel fill may have inclusions of:

1. Natural stones and/or other natural items or;

2. Artifacts and/or ecofacts.

9. Although a tunnel of the type sought in this project may not be directly datable (e.g. in contrast to a construction date molded into the concrete of a railroad tunnel), the tunnel may be dated indirectly by the dates on artifacts contained within it if any are present.

The test expectations for a subterranean room would be essentially the same as for a tunnel. The exception would be for test expectations 1, 2 and 3 above which would be modified to reflect necessary doorway(s) into a room, that the shape of the room would not be too linear (as a tunnel) but would be “room shaped”, i.e. square, round, or ovoid, and that a room would be of sufficient dimensions (length, width and height) to be distinguishable from a tunnel passageway. A room would thus be of sufficient size to accommodate a number of people interacting in a face-to-face manner as opposed to a tunnel which (depending on its size) would provide restricted possibilities for human interaction. Since, on balance, one would expect human usage of a room to be more prolonged than in a tunnel passageway, artifacts catering to prolonged usage would be expected in such a room, perhaps in the form of chairs, couches, tables, a lighting system, etc. These expectations were borne in mind during our search of the site.

Initial surveys would be conducted with remote sensing instrumentation. The author’s experience elsewhere predicted that Ground Penetrating Radar, rather than the terrain conductivity meter used in the previous survey, would be effective for anomalies beneath a concrete slab floor.

Findings

The profile of an entrance/exit tunnel was discovered under the foundation of the west wall of the building (Classroom #4, see map, p. 13, this summary). The signature of this feature was described and sketched by consulting geologist Don Michael, Ph.D. (p. 113). The feature was clearly distinguished by loose, disturbed soil and the artifacts contained within it. The outside margins had an inverted bell-shaped curve profile. The tunnel signature was established both by the sharp demarcation of soil color and texture, as well as by the exclusive presence within the cavity fill of assorted historic debris such as old cans and bottles, various metal fragments and small household items. The roof at that point was provided by the bottom of the concrete foundation. Inside the foundation a roof of soil was evident.

The profile was also demarcated by severed tree roots, the significance of which was described by professional tree surgeon Jerry Hobbs:

…running under the foundation from south to north was a large root which had been chopped off at the edge of where the large amount of cans, bottles, and plastic were being found. A growing root would have had to run in and through the cans and bottles but did not. The root, some 3″ in diameter had been severed with a hand saw about 90% through, then pulled off, peeling the bark of the root. The peeled layer of the cambium layer had well established healing already in progress. New feeder roots had started to grow from the cut portion of the root, and attained lengths of 6″ to 15″. A space of 59″ to the north the roots pick up again, only these had been chopped off from the larger root and were dead. [The dead root] was about 1″ in diameter and continued in the same 30 degree angle as the other root, the cambium layer was separating from the rest of the woody part of the root, indication it was probably severed at the same time the green root that was attached to the tree was severed. Both the feeder root lengths and the healing of the cambium layer indicate that the root had been cut at a time of 4 to 6 years earlier. I feel my determination is accurate due to my experience of the planting and removal and care of some of the same kind of trees for more than 25 years. To me this is conclusive that with the inconsistent soil area, the plastic bag dated 1982 [see next paragraph] and the old bottles, cans and debris, were put in the ground after 1982, and it was not an old dump area as it appeared. (Appendix III, pp. 174-176)

A plastic sandwich bag was found under the foundation at a depth of 42″ below the surface and 3-6″ inside the wall line of the building. The bag was imprinted with Disney characters and the words: “?1982 Walt Disney Productions”, along with a logo of a school house with “Disney Class of 1982/1983” underneath. These factors led Dr. Michael to conclude “therefore, the cavity could be no older than 1983″ (p. 84).

Due to the crucial location and dating of the Disney bag as evidence of recent disturbance, alternate hypotheses were examined. Could the bag have been artifactual not of a clandestine, buried tunnel but rather incidental to the parents’ March 1985 dig or to the subsequent SRS excavation commissioned by the district attorney? After careful analysis of the parameters of each excavation, Mr. Langenwalter, senior author of the SRS study, concluded that since the parents’ backhoe trench was no less than 137″ from the northwest corner, it is clear that the plastic Disney bag was located by Hobbs in the virgin area between the SRS excavation and the parents’ dig. In fact, it was recovered 7″ south of the parameters of the SRS excavation and approximately 13″ north of the parents’ backhoe trench (p.184).

The emphatic correlation of definitive observations for this tunnel entrance feature is especially significant in view of its location: the decision was made to explore this precise area because some of the children had stated that there had been animal cages placed along the wall and they had entered a tunnel under the cages at that point (cf. Langenwalter, et al, 1985: 13).

Excavations where conducted in the westernmost sector of Unit 1 in room #3. This site was selected because a G