The McMartin Preschool Trial — seven years, no convictions, lives in ruins

The McMartin Preschool case began in the beach suburb of Manhattan Beach, California, in 1983 and ended in July 1990 with every charge dismissed and not a single conviction. It centered on Ray Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, who taught at the family preschool founded by Virginia McMartin, and on lurid allegations that they and others had sexually and “ritually” abused scores of small children. By the time it collapsed, it had become the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history to that point — running roughly seven years and costing taxpayers an estimated $15 million — and the flagship spectacle of the 1980s “Satanic Panic.”

The outcome was unambiguous and, in hindsight, predictable. Two juries acquitted on most counts and deadlocked on the rest; prosecutors finally walked away. The case against the McMartins did not rest on physical evidence or adult eyewitnesses but, decisively, on what children said in interviews conducted months after the fact by Children’s Institute International, a Los Angeles abuse-evaluation agency. Those interviews, later studied by psychologists and held up as a cautionary model, used leading questions, anatomically detailed dolls, peer pressure, and rewards — techniques now understood to manufacture the very accounts they were meant to discover. The “ritual” details that gripped the public — underground tunnels, witches who flew, children flushed through plumbing or photographed by a satanic cult — were never substantiated by any evidence.

This dossier treats McMartin as a closed case with a known ending: not a story about whether monsters lurked in a preschool, but a documented failure of investigation and prosecution under the pressure of a national panic. The harm it caused is real and falls on two groups who must both be held with care. The accused — most of them women who had spent careers with small children — were jailed, tried, financially destroyed, and publicly branded for a crime no court could find they committed; Ray Buckey alone spent about five years behind bars awaiting trial before release on bail. And the children, some of them genuinely distressed, were drawn through repeated suggestive questioning into testimony that served no one, least of all them.