The Dark Tunnels of McMartin Dr. Roland C. Summit Journal of Psychohistory
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The Dark Tunnels of McMartin
Dr. Roland C. Summit
Journal of Psychohistory 21 (4) Spring 1994
describes crimes of abuse
(posted with permission)
Roland Summit is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at
Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (Building D-6, 1000 W. Carson St.,
Torrance, CA 90509). He has been the community psychiatrist to the
South Bay area of Los Angeles County since 1966, specializing
exclusively in child sexual abuse since 1975. He was assigned the role
of county Department of Mental Health Liaison to the community of
Manhattan Beach in the wake of the 1983-84 epidemic of preschool abuse
allegations.
FALSE ARGUMENTS
The subject of ritual cult abuse of children is so loathsome and
provocative that it is at risk of being regarded only in extremes.
Those drawn into believing that there is such a thing become
fascinated and terrified by its limitless implications while those who
remain skeptical seem determined to quash and disqualify any evidence
that it might exist. Most of those who believe have been personally
touched and emotionally moved by association with alleged victims,
while the skeptics enjoy the luxury of analyzing the phenomena in
retrospect from a distance that passes for objectivity. Both sides of
this divergent drift seem reluctant to acknowledge a possible
intermediate reality: that while some aspects of the accounts are
patently impossible, there remains an elusive core of sadistic
obscenity.
It should be obvious that any possibility of such inconceivable and
invisible cruelty must be confronted and understood before we as a
people can move ahead to define the real dimensions of human
experience and the remarkable complexities of personal and collective
psychohistory. Considering the potential benefits of that
confrontation-new insight into alienation, despair, rage, violence,
dissociation, and the vagaries of memory and of ultimate
accountability – it is all the more remarkable and lamentable that
scholars are willing to harp at the extremes (worldwide satanic
subversion versus therapist-induced hysteria) rather than to delve
into the common ground of human perversity and deliberate psychic
trauma.
The distractive, polarizing debate is renewed in David Lotto’s opening
challenge in this scholarly Journal of Psychohistory (1). Must we
start with witches and witch hunts? Should we cancel the message by
attacking the character of the messengers? Can we define history by
assigning cause and effect to untested post hoc connections?
Dr. Lotto traces the origin of ritual cult abuse survivor stories to
1980, with the patient/therapist collaboration of Michelle Remembers.
(2) Such attribution of cause and effect is no less magical than
assigning the power of spring time to the first crocus. And how is it
relevant that Dr. Pazder divorced his wife and married his former
patient, or that the psychologist who “interrogated” Ileana Fuster
before her testimony in the Country Walk prosecution had himself been
imprisoned for sexual assault of his clients? Such ad hominem examples
assign a moral defect to the entire class of professionals who elicit
lurid confessions from their clients. The credibility of every
informant is similarly trashed by the droning presumption that they
are all either infantile, mentally ill, or locked in a folie a deux
with misguided therapists.
If post hoc ergo propter hoc arguments are to be honored, and if an
author is to be equally empathic with all the players, one might
consider that McMartin whistle blower Judy Johnson’s psychotic break
and alcoholic toxicity were precipitated by, rather than precipitants
of, her desperate concern that she and her not-quite three-yr-old son
were victims of unfathomable treachery. Having met Ms. Johnson in
February, 1984, I am convinced of the first option. Judy Johnson was
quite sane and emotionally contained even as she described the
improbable complaints of her child “He doesn’t like to talk about
being buried alive or about large animals or that he was sodomized by
a lion”. (3) Such complaints were unheard of in 1984, but they made
more sense as older, less credulous children in the Netherlands
(1987), England (1988) and North Carolina (1989) made quite
independent observations that the wild animals had zippers on their
costumes.
It is painful even to contemplate the stresses this young mother tried
to endure during the succeeding years. She had always been an anomaly
among McMartin parents, an outsider without access to the supportive
social groups that had patronized the preschool. She was alienated
from her husband and increasingly reclusive in a small house with her
two children, one a putative victim of a formless conspiracy and the
other dying of a brain malignancy. She barricaded herself against the
menacing strangers who patrolled her yard. Who knows if they were
intimidating conspirators or toxic hallucinations? Her hyperprotective
stance toward her children warranted protective service and mental
health intervention and she was hospitalized briefly. I did not
recognize Judy Johnson the last time I saw her alive, in the summer of
l986 she was bloated and somewhat incoherent, visibly damaged.
The extensive criminal investigation and the evidence selected by
prosecutors for the McMartin trials had nothing to do with information
gained from Judy or her child. Nor did she galvanize parental group
hysteria. She lived and died an outsider in Manhattan Beach society.
She was fair game for the posthumous recreation as the cause of it
all. For the successful theory of defense and in the legacy of two
mistrials she became the icon of hysterical misconception, the Chicken
Little of a bird-brained gaggle of malicious parents. For those who
knew her through those harried years she was the perfect embodiment of
a sad truth: the individual who is suspicious enough to uncover a
perfectly hidden evil will have to shoulder the blame for the chaos
that is bound to follow. (4)
The Miami Country Walk convictions, featured in Dr. Lotto’s argument
as a miscarriage of justice, are ripe for attack because they stand in
the way of a backlash sweep. The case has remained as the most
demonstrably real and potentially understandable of all the ritual
prosecutions to date. Investigators found physical evidence, including
photographs of unmistakeable fecal fetishism showing Frank Fuster’s
wife and child soiled with feces. The crucifix described by the
children as the instrument of Fuster’s bloody demonstrations of the
rape of Ileana was found under the mattress of their bed. Frank
Fuster’s own child described the private, utterly sadistic torture he
and Ileana endured apart from the other children in their care. The
case was not burdened with allegations of hooded strangers, satanic
ceremonies, birth rituals or infant sacrifice; children described the
stuff of exorbitant human perversity.
The Country Walk case is unique for the information and testimony
gained from a co-defendant, but Ileana’s dramatic turnabout was not
the pivotal element for the jury. Ileana decided to testify, at the
urging of her attorney and with no plea bargain with prosecutors, only
after jurors were reduced to tears in response to viewing the entirety
of the videotaped interviews with the children. Earlier, Ileana had
shown a slave-like loyalty to her husband. Her deposition just prior
to testimony described a dismally recognizable pattern of teenage
sexual enslavement: deception, kidnap, rape-marriage, perverse
humiliation and torture imposed by her husband before he presented her
to his Country Walk neighbors as an adult specialist in child care.
When she finally renounced him in the courtroom, she was like a child
cringing in terror against all-powerful retaliation.
The skepticism encouraged by the woeful lack of physical evidence in
typical multivictim, sadistic sexual abuse cases can be artificially
hyped by the double standard applied to victim disclosures: claims of
the improbable are logically rejected while retractions are
uncritically embraced as definitive. Recollections of unspeakable
trauma are said to be distorted by dissociation or implanted by
suggestion while denials are literally endorsed. The most misleading
aspect of Dr. Lotto’s apparently sophisticated and psychologically
enlightened opening article is its adherence to that simple and
socially reassuring double standard. He dismisses Ileana’s elaborate
and self-jeopardizing description of her as coached and coerced while
her continuing selfjustification is advanced as the argument not only
for her own innocence but for the exculpation of her codefendant.
Ileana couched her confession within a contradictory assertion of
innocence. Such ambivalence and confusion invite psychological
considerations beyond a simple truth-or-lie dichotomy. Instead, Dr.
Lotto chooses one side of that uncertainty to nullify the judgment of
the jury, the parents, and the children. But dissociation cuts both
ways; if victims of unspeakable acts cannot accurately own the reality
of their experience, can we insist that the accused are perfectly in
touch with and accountable for their unspeakable actions?
When I had occasion to talk with Ileana Fuster after her testimony,
she was irate in her self-defense, but more telling in the
psychological complexity of her dilemma. I had asked her how it was
that she had so perfectly protested her innocence, and how she had
passed the polygraphs if she had done the things she described. “I
didn’t do those things,” she protested,”I couldn’t do things like
that. I’m not that kind of person! Frank made me do them.”
Who is to blame for the explosion of strange stories of sexual sadism?
How are are we to interpret the quixotic reversals of ambivalent
assertions? If we can’t consider some core of truth without physical
proof, can we allow contrived “reasonable explanations” to prove
everything is false? The reasonable explanations have proliferated in
the wake of unreasonable allegations. That response is clearly
opportunistic of the status quo, supported by no more relevant or
verifiable evidence than the precipitating alarms. A jury found Frank
Fuster guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, of incredibly obscene
behavior. Investigative reporters, on a demonstrated mission to debunk
“satanic panic,” have proclaimed him innocent. (5)
In his conclusion Dr. Lotto discounts the traumatic consequences for
innumerable children as he defines Frank Fuster along with those
accused in the McMartin trials as “the very real victims, innocent of
any wrongdoing, who have suffered traumatic consequences from being
caught up in a net of hysterical accusations.”
Who are we to be so sure of anything in the unresolved confusion of
ritual allegations? How can we tolerate preemptive conclusions before
we have examined the most rudimentary questions? If criminal
conviction of defendants is not only irrelevant but prejudicial to the
credibility of the complaining witness, what will it take to re-
examine the potential reality of these unwelcome complaints?
Would additional material evidence vindicate the merely testimonial
proofs already rejected? If Judy Johnson’s concern for underground
terror, or the McMartin children’s claims of tunnels under the
preschool had solid verification, would that make a difference? The
tunnels, were, in fact, found in 1990, only to be met with massive
indifference.
THE TUNNELS
Parents and therapists began hearing children’s descriptions of
underground activities within months of their initial, more
conservative disclosures. Children described tunnels under the floor
of the preschool which led to an outside exit under the rabbit hutch,
and another underground passage to the neighboring building. They
explained they would be loaded into vehicles in the garage of that
building for transport to other locations of group ritual. They
described also a secret room accessed by the tunnels under the
preschool.
As in other cases, such claims proved an embarrassing red herring for
investigators. In common with descriptions of murder and pornography,
they promise discovery of the tantalizing smoking gun, the concrete
evidence that would confirm what might otherwise be dismissed as
infantile fantasies. When there are no bodies or blood, or when the
photos and videotapes can not be displayed, these “fish that got away”
tend to cast doubt on the veracity of the more modest claims, no
matter how plausible and recognizable the initial disclosures might
have been. Since the elusive fish are also descriptive of the most
threatening and grandiose scenarios-cult ritual with human sacrifice,
pornographic exhibitions, profiteering in organized crime-they also
precipitate an angry rift between believers and skeptics, especially
between parents and police. Parents become preoccupied by the
terrifying implications of these larger dimensions of victimization
while police, trained to avoid speculation in the absence of evidence,
view parents as alarmist and irrational in their naive credulity.
Priorities of prosecution further widen the rift. Child molestation is
a recognizable crime which can proceed to conviction on the
unsupported testimony of its victims. Religious ritual is
constitutionally exempt from prejudicial harassment. In the absence of
adult informants and incontrovertible evidence of criminal activities,
the implications of multiperpetrator conspiracies, occult networks of
religious fanatics-even the very existence of an undiscovered class of
grotesque criminality-become ridiculous impediments to any hope of
conviction. Parents see their children as spiritually mutilated while
prosecutors seek refuge in the familiar confines of sexual touching.
Lacking support from the institutions of justice, the more inventive
parents will pursue their own investigations and develop their own
conclusions, increasingly indifferent to the restrictions of
conventional logic and restraint. Any information gained through such
vigilant research is an embarrassment to the constraints of
prosecution.
Such was the course of the McMartin investigation. A small assemblage
of the most assertive parents pressured the district attorney to
search for the tunnels and to find the off-campus locations where
babies were slaughtered. When they met with stonewalling the parents
began their own forays in the neighborhood. Children led them to a
mortuary/crematory where they claimed to have pummeled dead bodies and
watched people burn. Parents were convinced that interior decorating
confirmed the identity with details anticipated by children’s
descriptions (6)
Prosecutors received such information with resentment and distrust. It
was both outside an acceptable chain of evidence and alien to what
they could reasonably charge.
In order to force the prosecutor’s hands on the tunnel question,
parents commissioned a backhoe one Saturday (March 16, 1985) and began
digging in the lot next to the preschool, where children described the
burial of sacrificial animals. The district attorney’s office them
commissioned a limited archaeological survey of the site. The net
effect of that effort was to disclaim any unusual underground
activity. Although all of the digging was outside of the building,
with no attempt to cut through the concrete slab floor of the
preschool itself, the officials declared there were no tunnels on the
site.
Although ritual elements were deliberately excluded from prosecution,
defense attorneys ridiculed the willingness of therapists and parents
to support the bizarre conspiracy theories implied by the children. A
boy who had testified for prosecutors only about sexual touching
responded to defense cross – examination with a typically grandiose,
tough-kid description of physically lifting a body from an open grave.
Other child witnesses described satanic weddings in neighborhood
churches.
Prosecutors had two choices: Containment or chaos. Either the children
experienced only sexual molestation at the hands of defendant
employees within the McMartin Preschool itself, and they only imagined
the tunnels, or someone had dug an escape route to an unrecognizable
underworld of sex and death orgies. Prosecutors took the simple choice
and thereby deferred to the skeptics, agreeing that children imagined
the strange things-but they really were molested. The jury found the
defense explanation more reasonable: a demonstratably crazy woman had
initiated a satanic witch hunt which was swept into absurd illusion
through leading questions from therapists and hysterical reinforcement
by parents eager to put themselves in the limelight of the case of the
century.
After more than five years of glaring public exposure and 33
consecutive months of the longest and most expensive trial in history,
the verdicts of January 8, 1990 left most parents angry and confused
but at least reconciled to a return to private life. The willingness
of a few to protest the failure of prosecution on television talk
shows exposed them to a peculiar kind of vilification. They were the
perfect scapegoats for a small band of investigative journalists out
to save the world from superstitious nonsense. The backlash gospel is
simple: Those who trumpet the hazards of ritual abuse are the ones
responsible for creating it. And they should be punished.
The decision (to retry Raymond Buckey on the undecided counts) came
after a period of grotesque agitation by the parents of the supposedly
abused McMartin children. They appeared on talk shows, and terrorized
Los Angeles Board of County Supervisors into voting 4 to 1 to urge the
district attorney to a new trial.
So now the McMartin parents can triumphantly torture poor Ray Buckey
again, abetted by the cowards and opportunists in the justice system.
But if people can be prosecuted on the words of children, then
children should take full responsibility for what they are saying. If
a child says he saw Ray Buckey kill a horse with a baseball bat (which
one did claim) and if this charge is disproved (which it was), then
the child should be indicted for perjury, with present prohibition
against such infant indictment removed.
If a parent abetted the child in this false accusation, then this
parent should be indicted for perjury, too. If the court then
establishes that parent and child were lying, at least the parent
should suffer the consequences. A few well-publicized sentences of
imprisonment of parents (along with “therapists” and social workers,
it goes without saying) and we would see a speedy end to these
disgusting miscarriages of justice. (7)
THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROJECT
Despite such pervasive scapegoating and predictable attrition, a few
parents remained alert to some hope of vindicating their children. The
opportunity came in April, 1990 with permission from the new owner of
the preschool to search for the tunnels before he demolished the
building and redeveloped the property. These soiled but solid citizens
managed to find what the district attorney had disclaimed: solid,
scientific evidence that someone had not only dug tunnels under the
preschool, but also had taken the trouble to try to undo them. The
results of this definitive excavation are described in meticulous
detail in the 185 page Report of the Archaeological Excavation of the
McMartin Preschool Site by E. Gary Stickel, Ph.D., the UCLA
archaeologist commissioned to do the study. (8)
My experience of the human background of this technical report adds
insight into the difficulty of establishing proof beyond reasonable
doubt of improbable claims, especially from a grass roots level of
interest. On first gaining permission, parents began digging in the
closet (in the northeast corner of classroom #3) described by children
as the entrance to a tunnel leading to the secret room (see Figure 1,
marked Unit 2). They found flecks of matching paint in the dirt they
removed, which could have proved that a shaft had once been open to
the closet above but their amateur efforts left open the possibility
that those vital markers had merely fallen into the hold during their
own excavation.
Such ambiguity led to some dissension among the parents and the
burdensome decision to commission a professional, scientific study.
From that point, established April 21, 1990, the project was impeded
both by a conspicuous absence of funds and a diminishing number of
participating parents. The financial and organizational responsibility
settled on only one parent, Jackie McGauley, who, not unlike her one-
time friend, Judy Johnson, is a single parent of two children,
struggling to make ends meet, without traditional ties to other
McMartin parental circles. Even the post-traumatic camaraderie that
had once defined a larger parental affiliation had long since
dissipated into somewhat alienated factions critical of one another
for their divergent responses to the experience (9)
This left just one person responsible for soliciting funding for the
project itself and the production of the report, with no apparent
institution or avenue available for ultimate publication and
distribution. Commercial publishers have a ready market for
outrageously opinionated books like Paul and Shirley Eberles’ The
Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial. (10) Such
revisionist manifestos proclaim a conspiracy of misguided prosecutors,
therapists and parents as the sole abusers of the children. Who will
pay for a dry, scholarly treatise that only implies that something
monstrous really happened, especially if the report is promoted by the
last remaining parental zealot? There is no really legitimate
institution for rehabilitation of children’s’s stifled complaints of
mysterious exploitation.
AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD THEM
At least one child had a voice in the archaeological project. Time was
running out before the bulldozers would obliterate the site and there
seemed to be no trace of the children’s secret room. Joanie (11) 12
years old, was visiting her old preschool with her mother. Dr. Stickel
asked her,”Can you tell us where it was that you entered the tunnels
and which way you turned?” Joanie gave a meticulous description of
every step along the way. Starting from the parents’ dig in the
northeast corner of classroom #3, she described being lifted down a
hole, turning right, going straight past the roots that brushed your
face, turning right again where you were hurried through the long
tunnel. “I liked to stop where the pipe was and swing on it. There was
a little boy who couldn’t reach the pipe, and sometimes I’d lift him
up so he could touch it. But right after that you had to duck down so
you wouldn’t hit your head on the cement, then you had to run again to
get to the secret room.”
Part of the course Joanie described corresponded to twin anomalies
which had been detected earlier by ground penetrating radar.
Corresponding openings had been cut in the concrete (Unit 1, classroom
3 and Unit 2, classroom 4, see Figure 1) but nothing unusual had been
found. Encouraged now by Joanie’s explicit directions, the
archaeologist extended the dimensions of the Unit 1 dig and discovered
an interface of contrasting soil. The concrete cutout had matched the
side walls of the tunnel so perfectly that the earlier dig had passed
right through the filled-in tunnel without ever distinguishing its
margins. Now that the profile of contrasting soil was defined the
tunnel could be reopened with precision. It proceeded westward beneath
a cast iron waste pipe, just as Joanie had described, and then passed
under the deep concrete foundation of the wall separating classrooms
#3 and #4. At the point where the tunnel passed under the foundation,
and only at that point, the concrete had been arched upward and worn
smooth, in contrast to the adjacent ragged contours and texture
assumed by concrete poured into an earthbottomed trench. Under the
classroom to the west the tunnel proceeded into a wide, room-like
potential space of contrasting earth fill bearing remnants of timber,
plywood and tar paper which appeared to have shored up the ceiling of
a “secret” room. All this had been implied for years by numerous
children and anticipated on the spot by Joanie.
There was no time to determine the entire parameters of the room-like
space, but there was enough excavation to show that it was 6 feet 8
inches high and at least 9 feet in diameter, and that it connected
through the predicted transit pattern to a previously discovered
tunnel artifact turning to the north and exiting under the foundation
of the west wall of the building, where the rabbit hutch used to be.
Although this landmark had been a target for the first parental back-
hoe expedition and the District Attorney’s archaeological search, and
although those previous excavations partially obscured the outer
feature, two of the project’s most definitive items were found just
inside of the western foundation. One was a tree root that had
originally grown across the path of the exit tunnel before being sawed
away. The proximal section of that root, still feeding the distant
avocado tree, had partially healed and sent out new sprouts where it
had been cut some years before. The distal section, isolated at the
other side of the exist, was withered and dead.
Beneath the floor of the exit, inside of the vertical plane of the
foundation in fill undisturbed by the earlier excavations, a plastic
lunch bag was found bearing the date of its distribution; “DISNEY
CLASS 82/83,” also printed “c1982 Walt Disney Productions.” Except for
some kind of clandestine intrusion, nothing in that location could
have been newer than September, 1966, when the foundation was poured.
Besides being different in color, texture and compaction from the
surrounding matrix, the dirt which filled the tunnel spaces varied in
composition along the length of the tunnel itself, always at odds with
the adjacent, indigenous soil. The western extremities of the fill,
including the room-like space, were peppered with a kind of trash pit
debris: old cans and bottles dating from the twenties through the
fifties, as if to establish a provenance antedating the 1966
construction of the preschool building itself.
The most conspicuous and naturally inexplicable items were found
placed exactly under the concrete arch between the two classrooms.
These were four large containers, two enameled iron pots, a crockery
jar, and a cast iron cauldron, arranged together in an upright
position, resting not where the floor would have been but halfway up
to the ceiling. There was no theoretical explanation for such location
except that they were placed deliberately within a pre-existing, half-
filled trench or tunnel. If all the artifacts represented random
scatter of trash on an earlier dump site, as some skeptics have
asserted, there is no justification for their exclusive delineation
within a discrete pattern of tunnels or trenches. And if such
conspicuous items as the four large containers had been littered on a
dump site, they would not have survived clustered, upright and
unbroken through the subsequent grading and levelling of the preschool
site.
The pattern of tunnels conformed to the architecture of the overlying
building but had absolutely no purpose or conformity to expected
trenching for foundations or utilities. In fact, the profile of the
shallow trench dug to accommodate the waste pipe leading across the
main tunnel (Joanie’s reach-up- and-touch pipe) was clearly
distinguishable as mechanically dug, showing the sharp angulation
characteristic of a backhoe, whereas the tunnels had a rounded floor
contour and shovel marks, showing that they had been dug by hand,
presumably under the pre-existing concrete. The stainless steel pipe
clamps joining an angle of the pipe where it crossed through the
tunnel space had a different quality from clamps elsewhere which had
remained buried since installation. The other clamps were corroded
from years of soil contact, while those crossing the tunnel looked
shiny and new.
Other features fell into uncanny, perversely predictable patterns, but
scientific documentation was less definitive for lack of time or
lacking permission to extend the excavations. There were roots
protruding into the fill where Joanie had predicted, along with a
linear succession of rotting posts that might have shored that portion
of the tunnel (Marked 2 and 3 in Unit 3, Classroom 3, Figure 1)
There was tentative identification of a shaft and horizontal passage
at the south-east end of the building, where children described going
from the closet to the building next door. A discrete tunnel could be
defined on the basis of differential fill and interruption of tree
roots, leading under the eastern wall and several feet beyond the
property line toward the adjacent triplex building (Figure 1). Owners
of the property refused permission for further excavation, so the
actual terminus of that tunnel feature remains open to speculation.
On May 29, 1990, I was invited to inspect the excavations. A district
attorneys representative looked in from the surface, never soiling his
suit to observe the demonstrated profiles of contrasting soil nor
crawling under walls to appreciate the extent and utility of those
potential tunnels. Prosecutors were at that time locked into the
retrial, trying unsuccessfully to prove the few deadlocked counts of
sexual molestation against a lone defendant. No one in authority could
possibly want to reopen old wounds of putative conspiracy.
The bulldozer moved in that afternoon and quickly smashed the stucco
building into splinters and dust. I have always wondered since that
day why such a flimsy structure needed a 29-inch deep foundation to
support a non-weight-bearing partition between two classrooms. The
four-inch slab itself would have been code-sufficient. Could it have
been designed as a strong-back girder over future sub-slab
excavations? There is no sensible explanation better than Joanie’s
naive observation than it was there to bump your head on. Dr.
Stickel’s report (p.95) concludes:
There is no other scenario that fits all of the facts except that the
feature was indeed a tunnel. 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 after 1966 (the construction date of the
preschool). This age assessment has also been corroborated by the
consulting Geologist for the project, Dr. Don Michael…
THE AFTERMATH
People magazine sent a reporter to interview Dr. Stickel. She reported
to headquarters the remarkable misunderstanding that the project found
nothing. Hearing this I called Dr. Stickel, who was dumbfounded: “I
told her the children said there were tunnels and we found tunnels. It
was as simple as that.” With some inside pressure, the magazine
researched a more definitive appraisal of the project but it was
bumped by more urgent priorities of space, perhaps by an unexpected
celebrity marriage or divorce.
Dr. Stickel, Jackie McGauley, another patent and two now-adolescent
McMartin children were brought face-to-face with debunking authors
Paul and Shirley Eberele and defense attorney Danny Davis for the
Maury Povich Show, broadcast June 21, 1993. In response to all the
complicated and sometimes explosive arguments which erupted during
that hour, Mr. Povich met Dr. Stickel’s description of the tunnels
with the perfect dismissal: “What are we saying? Any *hard* evidence
that abuse took place in these tunnels?” (emphasis his) (12)
At this point in the vastly larger, festering issue of ritual abuse,
there is little hope of hard evidence for anything, especially for
specific, ultimately trivial issues of individual criminal
culpability. Frank Fuster’s conviction served best to excite more
ingenious efforts toward blaming the victims. In the absence of a
published tunnel report, the last word in print remains with award-
winning Debbie Nathan:
The McMartin School was painstakingly proved for tunnels (by the
District Attorney). 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). They have spoken unremittingly of such
things, to the world and to their sons and daughters. They have told
their children, over and over, that they were abused, then rewarded
them for being traumatized. They have put them in therapy with adult
fanatics who have done the same, and enrolled them as guinea pigs in
the “research” projects of zealots.
The McMartin kids, and hundreds of others in ritual abuse spinoffs
across the country, have spent years trapped in clans whose identity
derives from a tent-revival belief in their children’s imagined
victimization. (13)
The McMartin Tunnels are just one more example of the continuing
uncovering of evidence of a bizarre and industrious dedication to
deception. The tunnels should raise serious questions against the
reassuring premise that no one would go to such elaborate lengths to
entrap children into illicit control. If the therapists were to blame,
and they implanted only stories of tunnels, then who planted the pots
in Joanie’s runway? The continuing obscurity of this potentially
provocative archaeological discovery should give the lie to another
reassurance: if things like this went on it would be impossible to
hide the evidence. It is not so much that the evidence is difficult to
hide as that we as a just and fair society are incapable of seeing it.
Judy Johnson saw blood on her infant’s diaper and has paid a terrible
price for trying to find how it got there. Other McMartin parents, now
distilled down to the essence of one, tried to find evidence for their
children’s complaints, only to be reviled as a malicious threat to
world serenity. Jackie McGauley has a hard-won documentation of
physical evidence to share. Who will buy it?
Footnotes: Below
1. David Lotto, “On Witches and Witch Hunts,” this issue.
2. Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder , Michelle Remembers, New York:
Congdon & Lattes Inc. 1980
3. Notes of an office consultation with Judy Johnson, February 9, 1984
4. It is no accident that the person who blows the whistle on
previously unsuspected and unprecedented extremes of abuse proves to
be especially vulnerable to ad hominem attack. It takes an eccentric,
potentially alienated personality style to over-ride the shared
reassurances of more comfortably socialized peers. All forms of child
sexual abuse have been protected by what Jean Goodwin has called the
shared negative hallucination among clinicians and other opinion
makers in respected authority, who will not perceive abuse when they
confront it. (Credibility problems in multiple personality disorder
patients and abused children. In: Childhood Antecedents of Multiple
personality, ed. R.P. Kluft. Washington: American Psychiatric Press,
1985, pp. 2-19). As Suzzen Sgroi observed at the dawning of the
current wave of discovery, “Unfortunately willingness to consider the
diagnosis of suspected child sexual molestation frequently seems to
vary in inverse proportion to the individual’s level of training. That
is, the more advanced the training of some, the less willing they are
to suspect molestation” (p. 20, Sexual molestation of children: The
last frontier in child abuse. Children Today 4: May-June, 1975, pp.
18-21,44).
In the many multi-victim cases I have studied, there is a prodromal
pattern of parental group denial before an eccentric outsider triggers
a threshold of recognition. Concerned parents are reassured by
“reasonable explanations” for potential indicators of abuse. Nylon
underwear, bubble baths, constipation, masturbation, self-exploration
“explain” genito-rectal inflammation, even foreign objects in the
vagina. Conventional, well-socialized parents (and professionals)
receive these reassurances with relief, repeating and reinforcing them
among one another in extended circles. It remains for the odd one, the
unsocialized outsider to pursue the nagging suspicion that the
authorities could be wrong and to develop an arrogant, quasi-paranoid
reliance on personal, intuitive belief. Such a person is easily
stigmatized as eccentric and unreliable, if not crazy. The absence of
authoritative substantiation leaves each successive believer dependent
on a reversal of the old standard of evidence: seeing is believing; if
I hadn’t believed it I wouldn’t have seen it.
Judy Johnson was not only an eccentric but something of an irritant in
Manhattan Beach society; she was at war with the local school board to
acquire home care for her ailing older son. She was distrustful of
doctors and devoted to holistic notions of diet and health. It was
this very eccentricity which led her to go out of town for university
confirmation of her suspicions of sexual abuse after local doctors
dismissed them. It was that young child’s isolation from medical
contact that led the mother to the telling question and which
confirmed the truth of the child’s answer.
When I asked Ms. Johnson during the February 8, 1984 office visit how
she discovered “David’s” abuse, she explained, “It just grew with me.
He had such discomfort with school. He cried every noon. But (the
school director) warned me that if I gave in to him I’d always be a
slave to his whims. He kept trying to give me a shot. I’m a very
organic person and he had no contact with shots. I took him to the
doctor for the redness and he said it was either from constipation or
worms. Then I saw the blood and I knew he was sodomized. But my
friends assured me that kids are very anal. I asked David several
times if (his teacher) put his penis in his rectum. He always said
‘no’. Then later it occurred to me to ask, “David, did (your teacher)
give you a shot in your bottom?” and he said ‘yes’.”
5. Debbie Nathan “Reno Reconsidered,” Miami New Times, March 3-9,
1993, pp. 10, 12, 18, 20, 24, 27-29. Also “Revisiting Country Walk,”
Issues in Child Abuse Accusations 5(1), Summer 1993 pp. 1-11. See note
#7 for Nathan’s role in debunking the concept of ritual abuse. The
investigative reporter who lived in the Country Walk community and who
was a participant-observer throughout the development of the case
wrote quite a different account. See Jan Hollingsworth, Unspeakable
Acts, New York: Congden & Weed, 1986, for 592 pages of cogent
narrative and authentic documentation of the case.
6. By reviewing the parental investigations in the light of official
disapproval, I do not mean to trivialize nor to discredit their
findings. The absolute confidentiality of criminal investigation makes
communication a one-way process, with no opportunity to know how
seriously the leads were taken or to what extent they were confirmed.
In addition to the mortuary discovery parents followed a child-guided
route in search of “the doctor’s house” where blood rituals had been
described. They found a residence in an affluent community some 20
miles away matching the description offered independently by several
children. Authorities confirmed it was owned by a physician. No
further information was ever divulged.
I had occasion to feel personally how the alarm of clinicians can be
left unresolved by grudging investigation. I had been consulted in
1984 by a therapist who wanted help in reporting her suspicion of
criminal conspiracy. She was concerned for the safety of two preschool-
aged clients, brother and sister, and for their frightened mother, who
believed her estranged husband was involved in large scale drug
dealing and child prostitution. The children had led their mother to
the place they had described where their father had taken them for
encounters with naked adults and children (they denied ever being
molested, but their drawings were full of decapitation and bloodshed).
The children spoke of group encounters in other locations as well,
involving both a defendant in the McMartin case and a suspect from a
second preschool then under investigation.
The building shown to the mother, the Coco Palms Motel, had been the
site of a babysitting service sex abuse investigation apparently
unrelated to either preschool case. But two McMartin children, upon
seeing a newspaper picture of the Coco Palms suspect, had
independently identified him as the “Wolf Man” who delivered drugs to
the abusive rituals of their own alleged experience.
The law enforcement team especially assembled to investigate the
presumption of linkages among the seven suspected area preschools took
my report on behalf of the anxious therapist, promising to follow it
up immediately. I was told only months later than nothing had come of
their investigation.
The therapist who had been involved in the identification of the “Wolf
Man” was stigmatized by police for having deliberately left the
newspaper in view of her young clients, and for reporting her
observations to the local police rather than to the special preschool
task force. The alleged wolf man died of a drug overdose and the man
and woman named as his Coco Palms accomplices were spared prosecution
when the children recanted their complaints.
Such complexities abound in putative but unproven conspiracies. While
these apparent connections could have been coincidental and enhanced
with parent-and-therapist-induced red herrings, the preemptory
dismissal and the policy of with-holding the findings of official
investigations leave the therapists caught in the unresolved position
of amateur investigators, distrustful of the officials and unprotected
against escalating fear.
7. Alexander Cockburn, Viewpoint: “The Mcmartin Case: Indict the
Children, Jail the Parents.” The Wall Street Journal, February 8,
1990, p. A17. This virulent op-ed piece includes the standard backlash
attribution of the case: “The allegations… had been extorted from her
two year old by a mother-now-dead- with a history of mental illness…,”
without acknowledging that the “history” occurred only after the
allegations. Cockburn also cited Judy Johnson and her McMartin case as
the harbingers of the entire ensuing “hysteria” over satanic abuse in
an elaborate review of some 36 cases and 91 arrests. “In this
purgative frenzy many lives were destroyed” (”Out of the Mouths of
Babes: Child Abuse and the Abuse of Adults.” The nation, February 12,
1990, pp. 190-191) In his recurring column entitled “Beat the devil.”
He invoked the McMartin case in deploring the prosecution of the
Little Rascals Daycare case in North Carolina in his syndicated
‘Column Left.’ Citing “daycare panics in more than 100 cities,” he
sums up his dismissal with, “Satan mongering is an industry of sorts,
served by repugnant legal stratagems and nourished by bogus experts:
Day Care Satanism and ‘therapy’”. Los Angeles Times, September 5,
1991, p B13
An early journalistic reinvestigation of the McMartin case identified
the six people who successively created the incredible concept of
massive abuse: “Mother,” “Cop,” “Social Worker,”
“Politician” (District Attorney), “Reporter,” and “Prosecutor” (Mary A
Fischer. “A Case of Dominoes?: Did six crucial players simply invent
the longest, most expensive, most sensational-and most trumped up-case
in LA.’s history? Los Angeles, October 1989, pp 126, 135). This
scenario, which parallels the theory of defense in the already-
acquitted Jordan, Minnesota case, is offered as “the solution to the
McMartin puzzle (which) eludes most of the public and the media” (p
135). The mother was, of course, Judy Johnson: “It was this call (to
the police) on August 12, 1983 that sparked the biggest mass
molestation case in history, but for Johnson, it was another in a
series of steps toward madness and an early death from an alcohol-
related liver disease” (p. 128). The article presupposes that the
increasingly bizarre allegations were a product and not the producer
of that decline. The article stresses the absence of evidence for the
pornography and tunnel claims, exaggerating the scope and negative
significance of the official excavation: “A Huntington Beach
archaeological research team was hired to make a painstaking search
for alleged underground rooms and tunnels where the children claimed
they’d been molested. The researchers tore up the preschool floor and
used an electronic scanning device to try to locate the secret
passages” (p. 135). In fact, they merely peeled back some of the
asphalt tiles looking for potential interruptions in the concrete slab
floor and relied on an inappropriate instrument to disclaim the
possibility of disturbance under the concrete. According to Dr.
Stickel, who excavated the tunnels, the terrain conductivity meter
used by the first archaeological team was powerless to penetrate
concrete.
Debbie Nathan, a free-lance investigative journalist based in El Paso,
is the most articulate and influential of the ritual abuse skeptics.
She won the H.L Mencken Award for Investigative Journalism for “The
Making of A modern Witch Trial” The Village Voice, September 29, 1987,
pp 19-23, 26-32. In this vanguard standard of backlash rhetoric she
deplores the criminal conviction of two El Paso women through a
detailed analysis of the overzealous, children-never-lie crusades she
attributes to the prosecutor, child protective service workers and
parents. Citing the history of bizarre charges against unlikely female
defendants initiated by the McMartin case, she traces the pattern
through Jordan, Minnesota; Niles, Michigan; Memphis; Country Walk in
Miami; Malden, Massachusetts; West Point; and Maplewood, New Jersey,
she highlights the ritualistic and presumably absurd allegations in
each and labels these cases “junior” McMartins. The sidebar feature
entitled “Sex, the Devil and Day Care (pp. 23 & 26) defines ritual
abuse as a contrived political tool to stigmatize working mothers and
to scapegoat women as potential child molesters. Beneath a photograph
of three female McMartin defendants in “the case that started it all,”
Ms. Nathan proposes that the attempt to “satanize” day care is a
strategic adjustment of the conflict between liberal feminist
objections to patriarchy and the conservative pressure to protect
intact families.
“But in the Reaganite 80’s, feminist consciousness-raising about
sexual violence hasn’t led to a critique of the family; rather it’s
encouraged moralism against evil people and narrowly legalistic
remedies. The times demand a scapegoat, and what better one than
daycare? If the private family is sacred then the public day care
center is profane. If stay-at-home mothers are holy, then the people
they pay to take care of their kids when they escape from the house
are witches. Day-care hysteria is another instance of how
conservatives have cornered the market these days, supplying
fundamentalist rhetoric for a public trying to sort out worry and
puzzlement over deep-seated social changes.”‘ (p. 26)
Debbie Nathan’s coupe de grace on ritual abuse was “What McMartin
Started; The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax (The Village Voice, June 12, 1990),
beginning and ending with an attack on the parents and their children
who appeared on the Geraldo Rivera Show in the wake of the January
verdicts of acquittal. It decries these people’s diehard insistence on
victimization. She challenges the credulity of the young people, who
had such fantastic stories they could not be used as witnesses, citing
especially the “Round-faced, 10-year-old” who according to her father,
has “talked about being molested under the school in tunnels lined
with flashing lights and pictures of the devil” (p. 36)
The article blames the case on the purportedly psychotic allegations
of Judy Johnson. Nathan traces the subsequent spread of incredible
allegations through-out the country and into Europe, stressing the
stereotypic absurdity of children who said that “the abuse took place
in churches; adults wore masks and costumes; they urinated and
defecated on children; they burned, stabbed, cooked, or drowned
babies; they sacrificed animals; they molested children in funeral
homes and buried them in cemeteries; they mutilated Barbie dolls,
extensive investigations have failed to support any of these claims.”
In questioning how “large numbers of literate, secular people” could
be duped into a Christian fundamentalist “paranoia about satanism,”
Ms. Nathan iterates what Dr. Lotto reiterates: the publication of
Michelle Remembers. The article reveals “there is evidence that the
details in ritual abuse charges came more from grown-ups than from
children: co-author Pazder consulted with the police and met with
parent Jackie McGauley during the early days of the investigation.”
That is hardly news, nor “evidence” though it has been slow to be
touted by the conspiracy theorists of rebuttal. I met with Dr. Pazder
at that time too – when he had come to Los Angeles to appear with
several parents on a nationally syndicated television news magazine
and after he had addressed a public meeting in Manhattan Beach parents
wanted to meet Dr. Pazder not to acquire details of ritual abuse but
to make sense out of them, because their child were *telling them*
stories of blood ritual with satanic trappings.
His conclusions about satanic cult ubiquity, however outlandish they
may seem to others, offered a “reasonable explanation” for parents
confronted with children growling obscenities and death threats in
half-awake nightmares. As a participant observer in what the sages now
dismiss as “satanic panic,” I can attest that the stories of costumes,
ceremonies, chants, bloodshed and death came first from children to
naive, incredulous parents and therapists, who sought in vain for a
more reasonable explanation from local authorities before turning to
occult literature and out-of-town experts who could offer a horrific
kind of understanding of their inexplicable distress. Similarly, the
television producers brought Dr. Pazder to Los Angeles not to
introduce the concept of satanic ritual abuse but to *address* it,
since it was by then common knowledge among journalists that children
and parents were describing unearthly obscenities.
Debbie Nathan concludes her investigation of the Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax
with the paragraph excerpted at the conclusion of this article (note
13) proclaiming the nationwide network of “clans” united with the”…
tent revival belief in their children’s victimization. Right wing
devil-mongers may find this subculture to their liking. But the rest
of us ought to recognize the harm it wreaking, not only on civil
liberties and the falsely accused, but also on day care on women’s
rights, and especially on children. Because the kids involved in this
hysteria have indeed suffered, but not at the hands of their teachers.
Compared to the abuses of a child-protection movement gone mad, could
incest be any worse?”
The “investigative journalists” have no need of evidence for their
clan conspiracy theory. With no more foundation than the presumption
that the satanic implications are not worthy of rational credence,
they state without any apparent doubt that another international,
interdisciplinary, intergenerational conspiracy to abuse children does
in fact exist, with agents so powerful in their misguided beliefs that
they can infuse death terror into the minds of children through mere
suggestion. And the perpetrators of this abuse are just the sort of
folks one would least suspect of terrorist agendas; they are the child
abuse finders who follow the dictates of the clinical high priest of a
child-protection movement gone mad.
Compared to the grandiosity of a backlash movement gone ballistic,
could a shared belief in satanic conspiracy be any worse?
8. Pending publication, there is no general access to this report, and
no assurance of when or how it might become available. Inquiries may
be directed to me, including any interest in assisting in publication.
Correspondence will beforwarded to the custodian of the McMartin
Tunnel Project, Ms. Jackie McGauley.
9. This mutually antagonistic response to common disaster is described
as typical of parents in cases studied by child psychiatrist Lenore
Terr. Initial bonding and cooperative optimism gives way to
displacement of rage toward one another as they discover no one can
perfectly resolve the collective trauma. Some withdraw and become
protective of their private lives and untarnished future, resentful of
other parents who try to keep the memory alive, especially those who
seem to revel in publicity and notoriety. Too Scared to Cry: Psychic
Trauma in Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1990, pp. 66-72.
10. Paul and Shirley Eberle, The Abuse of Innocence: The Mcmartin
Preschool Trial. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993. The Eberles also
wrote the Politics of Child Abuse (Secaucus, N.) Lyle Stuard Inc.,
1986) which centers on the McMartin case as the bellwether of the
nationwide “child abuse witch hunt” (p. 285) “resulting in the
devastation of innocent peoples lives and families (p, 283). Both
books lionized defendants and defense interests while defaming
everything and everyone associated with child protection. Such
polemics also illustrate the gospel of the dual attack on child
protection. Ritual abuse cases are first debunked as de facto frauds,
then all sexual abuse complaints are tarred with the same brush..” We
believe that every molestation case in which there has been a
conviction should be reopened and reviewed.” (The Politics of Child
Abuse, p. 284)
11. In order to allow privacy for the child and her parents, “Joanie”
is a pseudonym.
12. The Maury Povich Show, nationally syndicated. Broadcast June 21,
1993
13. Debbie Nathan, “What McMartin Started:The Ritual Sex Abuse
Hoax,”The Village Voice, June 12, 1990. Also syndicated and reprinted
in many independent newspapers, such as Metro: Santa Clara Valley’s
Weekly Newspaper (AA) under the title, “The McMartin Syndrome” August
23-29, 1990, pp. 10-15
Roland Summit is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at
Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (Building D-6, 1000 W. Carson St.,
Torrance, CA 90509). He has been the community psychiatrist to the
South Bay area of Los Angeles County since 1966, specializing
exclusively in child sexual abuse since 1975. He was assigned the role
of county Department of Mental Health Liaison to the community of
Manhattan Beach in the wake of the 1983-84 epidemic of preschool abuse
allegations.