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NY TIMES REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: 6 MONTHS OF CALIFORNIA CASE
By Robert Lindsey
Feb. 13, 1985
Each weekday for more than six months, a curious ritual has been occurring in a courthouse here.
A white-haired, frail-looking 77- year-old woman is pushed down a hallway in a wheelchair, leading a procession of five other women.
Each time the cortege approaches or leaves a courtroom on the seventh floor, brilliant lights flash on.
Television crews, lying in wait like hunters, lunge forward and aim their cameras at the group.
And, just as instinctively, it seems, the woman in the wheelchair, Virginia McMartin, hunches forward, folds her head into her lap, and clamps both hands around her face, hiding from the cameras.
Their work completed for a while, the photographers resume gossiping and talking shop until the group appears again.
Meanwhile, in the courtroom, talk resumes about what prosecutors say were ''satanic rituals'' and about allegations that a brown pony was slaughtered to intimidate children into silence about sexual abuse.
A preliminary hearing to determine if Mrs. McMartin; her daughter, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 58 years old; two of her grandchildren, Peggy Ann Buckey, 28, and Raymond Buckey, 26, along with three other teachers at her now-defunct private nursery school in suburban Manhattan Beach should stand trial on 208 counts of child abuse is in its seventh month.
Their arrest a year ago and prosecutors' allegations that as many as 150 children were molested at the Virginia McMartin Preschool in the last decade touched off a national surge of concern over child abuse, especially at nursery schools.
The wave of publicity set off a counterreaction. Some lawyers have argued that in such an atmosphere innocent adults might be prosecuted and their lives ruined as a result of mistakes or fantasies by children and overly zealous prosecutors.
The McMartin case is viewed as a test of the judicial system's ability to deal effectively and fairly with the emotionally charged issue of allegations of sexual abuse of children.
Already one of the longest pretrial court proceedings in the history of Los Angeles County, the hearing has generated more than 630 volumes of transcript and has cost county taxpayers more than $1 million.
On one side, prosecutors and their witnesses paint a picture of alleged events at the school that at times are so horrifying they seem a Gothic catalogue of evil.
On the other side, lawyers for the seven defendants call the allegations ''absurd,'' ''impossible,'' and ''fantasy'' and compare the situation to the Salem witch trials of three centuries ago, saying that their clients and the people convicted in Salem of being witches are innocent victims falsely accused on the basis of testimony by youths and children.
The hearing is expected to last at least six more months before the case is transferred, as both sides expect, to the Superior Court for trial.
Prosecutors say they intend to present as witnesses 41 former pupils of the school, almost all of whom, physicians testified at the hearing, showed physical evidence of having been sexually abused.
The second of the children to testify at the hearing, a 10-year-old boy who attended the McMartin Preschool almost five years ago, has now been on the witnesse stand for nine days, including eight days under intense cross examination by defense lawyers who have been trying to find inconsistencies in his story.
So far, often under rapid-fire questioning that might wither some adult witnesses, the child has stuck to his story with only minor contradictions.
He described being sodomized or otherwise sexually molested by all seven of the defendants and asserted that children had been made to pose for pornographic pictures.
The 10-year-old boy repeated under cross examination an account of how he and other children were taken to a church where he said adults wearing masks and black robes danced and moaned while Mr. Buckey went to the altar and killed pet rabbits, turtles and birds and threatened to kill the children's parents the same way if the children told of the alleged abuse. On a trip to a farm, the boy said, Mr. Buckey ''chopped'' to death a pony with a long knife.
While the boy testifies, the defendants sit nearby under orders from Judge Aviva K. Bobb not to glare or otherwise visually intimidate him.
The six women among the defendants usually eat lunch in the courthouse cafeteria. Unlike the women, Mr. Buckey has not been released on bail; he does not join them for lunch.
Each defense lawyer makes the 10- year-old boy go over his story again and again in great detail, bringing angry protests from the prosecutors, who say the defense lawyers are ''badgering'' the boy, and, occasionally, from Judge Bobb, who asks the defense lawyers, usually without success, to avoid repetitious questioning.
Noting that the children's testimony is being videotaped for possible use at a later trial, and that they may have no other chance to cross -examine the children, the defense lawyers press on.
Today the child said that he had seen Mr. Buckey kill a pony on more than one occasion, contradicitng earlier testimony that only one pony had been slaughtered.
Triumphant, one defense lawyer, Eliseo Gauna, told reporters that the apparent contradiction showed the boy's entire testimony had been ''imagination exploded.''
The defense lawyers have said that the accounts of sexual abuse at the McMartin school were fabricated by the children, their parents, psychologists and prosecutors. Today the prosecutors refused to agree that the reference to the pony constituted a major setback for their case.
Outside the courtroom, the defense team has faced other problems. The other day, a technician on a television crew had a run-in with one defense lawyer in an elevator in which a punch or two was reported thrown and the lawyer was accused of ''defending the devil.''
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 13, 1985, Section A, Page 16 of the National edition with the headline: REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: 6 MONTHS OF CALIFORNIA CASE.
