The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: A Present Day Witch Hunt Introduction “The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history, should serve as a cautionary tale. When it was all over, the government had spent seven years and $15 million dollars investigating and prosecuting a case that led to no convictions” (“The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: An Account”). Raymond Buckey, Peggy Buckey (Raymond’s mother), Peggy Ann Buckey (Raymond’s Sister), Virginia McMartin (founder of the school), and Mary Ann Jackson, Bette Raidor, and Babette Spitler, otherwise known as the “McMartin Seven” were indicted on 115 counts of alleged child sexual abuse. Throughout the trial the prosecutors had concocted …show more content…
“Parents were encouraged to send their children to CII (Children’s Institute International) for two-hour interviews... Children generally denied seeing any evidence of abuse at first, but eventually many gave McFarlane (Kee McFarlane leading therapist for abused children) the stories that she clearly wanted to hear. After the interviews, McFarlane told parents that their children had been abused, and described the nature of the alleged abuse”(“Famous-Trials”). By March 1984, she reported that 384 students had been sexually abused. In addition, 150 other children had been examined by Dr. Astrid Heger, a doctor of the same organization, who concluded that 80% of these students had been …show more content…
Although her first accusation seemed believable her later reports became increasingly more bizarre; “She claimed that Peggy Buckey, Ray’s mother, was involved in satanic practices: she was said to have taken Johnson’s son to church, where the boy was made to watch a baby being beheaded, and then was forced to drink the blood. She insisted that Ray Buckey had sodomized her son while his head was in the toilet, and had taken him to a car wash and locked him in the trunk. Johnson told police that Ray pranced around the preschool in a cap and a Santa Claus costume, and that other teachers a the school chopped up rabbits and placed ‘some sort of star’ on her son’s