McMartin Preschool Case Facts, Physical Evidence, Tunnels

Reporter’s Notebook: 6 Months of California Case By Robert Lindsey February 13, 1985 “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 witness 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. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/13/us/reporter-s-notebook-6-months-of-california-case.html

"Behind the Playground Walls – Sexual Abuse in Preschools" Jill Waterman, Robert J. Kelly, Mary Kay Oliveri, Jane McCord – Guilford Press New York 1993 “In the most well-known case, involving the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, two juries from successive trials became hopelessly deadlocked and failed to agree on a verdict after 7 years of investigation and trial. At the press conference following the trial, 9 of the 11 jurors who agreed to be interviewed indicated that they believed the children had been molested, but they felt that the evidence presented did not enable them to state beyond a reasonable doubt who had perpetrated the abuse.”

Tunnel report that backed up reports at McMartin:
The project unearthed not one but two tunnel complexes as well as previously unrecognized structural features which defied logical explanation. Both tunnel complexes conformed to locations and functional descriptions established by children's reports. One had been described as providing undetected access to an adjacent building on the east. The other provided outside access under the west wall of the building and contained within it an enlarged, cavernous artifact corresponding to children's descriptions of a "secret room".
http://web.archive.org/web/20010123212200/members.cruzio.com/~ratf/McMartin.html/

Boy, 7, Is Witness in California Child Abuse Case by Robert Lindsey January 23, 1985 A 7-year- old boy testified today that he had played ”naked games” at the Virginia McMartin Preschool near here and that in at least one of the games teachers at the school had touched his genital organs….Prosecutors have asserted that more than 100 children were abused at the school in the past decade.
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/23/us/boy-7-is-witness-in-california-child-abuse-case.html