THE McMARTIN PRESCHOOL TRIAL

THE CLAIM

That a network of preschool staff conducted ritualised sexual abuse of children in secret tunnels beneath the school, as part of a wider satanic conspiracy operating across the United States.

THE THEORY, AS ITS PROPONENTS TELL IT

The claim as it was believed at the time is stated above, and it was believed widely, by police, prosecutors, therapists and national media.

It began with one mother's allegation in 1983. She was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and died in 1986, but by then the investigation had expanded enormously. Some 400 children were interviewed by a therapy organisation using techniques now recognised as grossly suggestive: repeated questioning, rewards for the desired answer, puppets, and explicit statements that other children had already told.

The resulting accounts escalated. Children described tunnels under the school, animal sacrifice, being flown to remote locations, and a teacher flying. Proponents at the time treated the bizarre elements as evidence of deliberate disorientation of the children rather than as a signal about the interviews.

The claim of tunnels was testable, and testing it is what eventually broke the case. Excavations were carried out. Nothing was found. The satanic ritual abuse panic of which this was the flagship case produced thousands of allegations nationally and, after years of FBI and academic investigation, not one corroborated instance of an organised satanic abuse network.

WHAT IS KNOWN

The interviewing techniques are documented on tape and have been analysed extensively. They are now standard teaching material for how not to interview a child witness, and directly produced the reforms in forensic interviewing used today.

Excavation of the site found no tunnels. A 1993 FBI report by Kenneth Lanning, who investigated the national phenomenon for years, found no evidence of organised satanic ritual abuse anywhere in the United States.

Raymond Buckey spent five years in pre-trial detention. His mother Peggy McMartin Buckey spent two. Neither was convicted of anything. The school closed and the family was destroyed.

The panic was not limited to McMartin. Comparable prosecutions in other states produced convictions that were later overturned, and several people served long sentences for crimes that the evidence now indicates never occurred.

EVIDENCE FOR

• Genuine child sexual abuse is real, common, and frequently concealed, which is why the allegations were taken seriously and why they should have been.
• Some children maintained their accounts into adulthood, and at least one has publicly stood by parts of the allegation.

EVIDENCE AGAINST

• The tunnels did not exist. This was the one checkable physical claim and it was checked.
• The interview tapes show the allegations being constructed in real time by adults, with children initially denying abuse and being pressed until they agreed.
• The originating allegation came from a source subsequently diagnosed with a psychiatric illness producing delusions, a fact known to prosecutors and not disclosed.
• No conviction survived, in the most expensive and exhaustively resourced prosecution of its era, and a multi-year FBI review found no organised satanic network anywhere.

ASSESSMENT

Debunked, and kept in this cabinet as the necessary counterweight to everything else in it. This archive spends most of its time showing that institutions really do conspire and that official denial is often worthless. McMartin is the other failure mode, and it is just as destructive: a conspiracy claim that authorities believed, prosecuted, and resourced for seven years, which was false, and which ruined innocent people. The lesson is not that allegations should be dismissed. It is that the mechanism which generates evidence matters more than the quantity of it, and that 400 interviews conducted badly are worth less than one tunnel that is either there or not.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE THE GRADE

• Closed on the one checkable physical claim: the tunnels were excavated and were not there.
• To reopen: physical corroboration of any allegation, of any kind. Seven years, $15 million and roughly 400 interviews produced none, and a multi-year FBI review found no organised satanic abuse network anywhere in the country.
• The interview tapes settle the mechanism. They show children denying abuse and being pressed until they agreed, which is why they are now standard teaching material on how not to interview a child witness.

FURTHER READING

• McMartin preschool trial · Wikipedia
• The satanic ritual abuse panic · the wider phenomenon
• Kenneth Lanning, Investigator's Guide to Allegations of Ritual Child Abuse, FBI (1992)