Word: mcmartin
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Although seven of the twelve jurors said they believed the nine child witnesses were molested "in some sense by someone," the prosecution was unable to show that the children were abused at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Nonetheless, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 63, and her son Raymond, 31, spent two years and five years, respectively, in jail before their acquittal on 52 criminal counts. They have lost everything, including their good standing in the community...
...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...
...Johnson was found to be an acute paranoid schizophrenic; she died of alcohol-related liver disease in 1986. But by then the prosecution no longer needed her. The police had written to 200 parents stating that the authorities were investigating oral sex and sodomy at the McMartin school. To the parents of affluent Manhattan Beach who thought the McMartin school was the first step on the road to Stanford, this was a bombshell. They soon had fantastic stories to tell after their children were interviewed by Kee MacFarlane, an administrator turned therapist at Children's Institute International...
...Angeles District Attorney Robert Philibosian, whose election 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...
...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...