Word: buckey
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...horror stories in the McMartin Pre-School trial are chilling for a different reason: despite seven years of investigations and trials, it may never be known whether they are true or false. In a Los Angeles courtroom last week, the jury in the child-molestation trial of Raymond Buckey, 32, a former teacher at the Manhattan Beach, Calif., preschool, declared itself deadlocked. With that, the state decided to drop the charges. Said prosecutor Joseph Martinez: "How long can you keep this...
...ordeal began on Aug. 12, 1983, when Judy Johnson complained to Manhattan Beach police that her son had been molested by a man named Mister Ray. The boy, 2 1/2, had attended McMartin Pre-School 14 times over three months and had been in Buckey's class no more than two afternoons. Johnson's complaints against Buckey grew increasingly bizarre. She accused him of sodomizing her son while he stuck the boy's head in a toilet, making him ride naked on a horse and tormenting him with an air tube. She made similar accusations against her estranged husband...
...campaign was not going well, made the case his own. He presented 18 children to the grand jury, which returned indictments against Raymond, his mother, sister, grandmother and three McMartin teachers. On March 24, 1984, police accompanied by television cameras arrested them at home. Raymond's sister Peggy Ann Buckey was arrested in front of her high school class. Only crippled matriarch ( Virginia McMartin, 82, honored for her community service, was allowed to surrender voluntarily...
...January 1986 charges against five of those originally accused and jailed were abruptly dropped when a new district attorney, Ira Reiner, declared a "complete absence of evidence" against them. That did not stop a determined prosecutor, Lael Rubin, from relentlessly pursuing the case against Peggy Buckey and Raymond. There was little corroborating evidence. Child pornography, which prosecutors had suggested was the Buckeys' motive, was not proved: despite an international search for evidence by five government agencies, including the FBI, no pornographic photos of the McMartin children were ever found...
Although the Buckeys were acquitted, the case is still not closed. District Attorney Reiner must decide whether to pursue the 13 counts against Raymond Buckey on which the jury could not reach a verdict. Peggy McMartin Buckey has filed a $1 million suit against the city, county, CII, and others. In Manhattan Beach, parents of the children are outraged. "The anger is beginning to rise," says parent Mary Mae Cioffi. "Our justice system needs a revamp for kids...