McMartin Case Resembles Sandusky Case in Many Eerie Ways

People often say Jerry Sandusky must be guilty, because there were so many accusers.

Indeed, eight men testified he abused them when they were underage – though they said nothing of it at the time.

The stories of the Sandusky accusers were so wild that someone should have questioned them aggressively, but Sandusky’s defense attorney did nothing right. Not once. Not ever. If he wasn’t playing for the other side, he was the most ineffective and incompetent trial attorney ever to enter a courtroom.

Now you say the system can never get it that wrong – even if Sandusky had an incompetent lawyer. Not with the media watching, with trained investigators from the state police, a white-haired, black-robed judge above bias, prosecutors charged with seeking justice, not convictions, and 12 members of a jury of his peers.

The McMartin Case

I recall the McMartin prosecution. The media, investigators, and prosecutors were corrupt, and the judge was biased, but the jury got it mostly right.

Much like the Sandusky case, which started with the mother of truth-challenged teenager Aaron Fisher, the McMartin case began about 26 years earlier with the mother of a boy who attended the McMartin Day Care.

It was 1983. Judy Johnson, the mother, told Manhattan Beach, California, Police Detective Jane Hoag that Ray Buckey, the 25-year-old son of the administrator of the daycare, wearing a cape and a Santa Claus costume, had sodomized her son, Mitchell, while sticking the boy’s head in a toilet.

Johnson also said Ray could fly in the air like the warlocks of old.

Johnson also reported Ray’s mother, Peggy Buckey, had taken Mitchell to church, where the boy saw a baby beheaded. Peggy forced Mitchell to drink the dead baby’s blood and stick his finger in the anus of a goat. 

Johnson said other McMartin teachers practiced bestiality, cut up live rabbits, and placed “some sort of star” on her son’s bottom.

The boy himself later told investigators that he was buried alive in a coffin without holes, and that a lion who played with an elephant hurt him. He was unable to identify Ray Buckey from pictures shown to him.

Sounds legit.

The police searched Buckey’s home, confiscating a graduation robe, a rubber duck, a Teddy bear, and Playboy magazines. 

Police questioned Buckey. While Detective Hoag had some doubts about Buckey’s ability to fly, she desperately wanted to believe Buckey had sodomized the lad. It would make her career, and there would probably be a movie with a beautiful movie star playing her.

Detective Hoag arrested Buckey on September 7, 1983.

The next day, based on the good word of Judy Johnson and Detective Hoag, Manhattan Beach Police Chief Harry Kuhlmeyer sent a form letter to about 200 sets of unsuspecting parents of current and former students at the McMartin school. He told them that Ray Buckey might have done some terrible things to their children, asking the parents to question their children, and even sent them a prestamped addressed envelope for the soon-to-be-shocked parents to reply.  

The text of the letter read: 

September 8, 1983

Dear Parent:

…Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim. Our investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include: oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense of “taking the child’s temperature.” Also photos may have been taken of children without their clothing. Any information from your child regarding having ever observed Ray Buckey to leave a classroom alone with a child during any nap period, or if they have ever observed Ray Buckey tie up a child, is important.

Please complete the enclosed information form and return it to this Department in the enclosed stamped return envelope as soon as possible. We will contact you if circumstances dictate same.

We ask you to please keep this investigation strictly confidential because of the nature of the charges and the highly emotional effect it could have on our community. Please do not discuss this investigation with anyone outside your immediate family.”

Would you believe that despite the chief’s well-thought-out entreaty for 200 sets of parents, parents reacted with panic and hysteria?

 It was only a short time before the media reported the investigation.

The District Attorney handed the investigation to social worker Kee MacFarlane, who headed the Children’s Institute International (CII), an agency that made its income from identifying and treating abused children. Police directed anxious parents to take their children to CII for interviews. 

At first, children denied abuse. But MacFarlane had developed an interviewing technique that elicited admissions from children who otherwise would not have said Buckey had abused them. During the interviews, which were videotaped, MacFarlane and her associates asked children questions such as “Can you remember the naked pictures?” “Did he touch you on the bottom?”

To help children remember, MacFarlane used anatomically correct dolls and puppets, such as Mr. Alligator, Mr. Snake, Detective Dog, and Mr. Sparky.  

She knew how to draw children out when she told them they were smart if they answered yes to specific questions. She expressed disapproval when they failed to disclose abuse.

MacFarlane sometimes spoke in the voice of Mr. Detective Dog and sometimes in the voice of Mr. Pac-Man. When a child said something about abuse, touching, or naked games, she praised him. When the child said nothing had happened, she rephrased the question and asked again or told the child about other children who had already said the bad things had happened to them.

All told, clever MacFarlane uncovered more than 300 children she claimed were abused. By the time of the trial, 11 children testified (more on the trial later).

The prosecutors in the Sandusky case did not send form letters. With only the notorious liar Aaron Fisher as a victim for two years, PA State Police went to hundreds of potential victims who knew Sandusky or attended one of his Second Mile charity camps. They came up empty-handed after speaking to hundreds of young men, who all said Sandusky never abused them.

The McMartin case featured accusers who were still children when they testified. History has proven that the notorious Kee MacFarlane manipulated them into false memories.

In the Sandusky case, the accusers were all adults and were incentivized to lie by the lure of millions, which everyone did get from Penn State. The PA State Police used highly suggestive and sometimes intimidating tactics to get accusers.

There were even two quacks of the Kee MacFarlane school of bogus therapy. Mike Gillum, the bankrupt therapist in need of money, coached Aaron Fisher into lying about Sandusky abusing him and later the notorious Brett Swisher Houtz.  And, of course, there was quack therapist Cynthia MacNab, who coached most Sandusky accusers, even in group sessions, where she guided the accusers to compare notes and embellish their stories of abuse. By being with a therapist, she gave them cover under the bullshit notion that the reason they had at first said Sandusky did not abuse them was because they had repressed memories.

It Took Hard Work By a Lot of People to Wrongfully Convict Sandusky

Later, PA prosecutors took a page from McMartin and advertised for victims, which civil lawyers had done for some time in the Sandusky case. It took three years, a lot of advertising, interviews, police threats, and lawyers’ offers of millions to round up eight accusers to perjure themselves on the witness stand about Jerry Sandusky.

And it took two therapists to keep the eight liars on track. They made up some incredible stories of abuse that grew wilder with each retelling. I am a little surprised that one of them didn’t see Sandusky flying through the air or beheading babies, then forcing them to drink the blood.  

In our next post comparing the McMartin and Sandusky cases, we will look at the stories of the accusers – the children in McMartin and the men who pretended to be children in the Sandusky case – and how the prosecutors suborned perjury in both.

If you wish to be on our email list to get information and new stories on the wrongful conviction of Jerry Sandusky and/or add your name to the growing list of supporters requesting Penn State Trustees to examine the evidence, email me at FrankReport76@gmail.com.

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

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