The McMartin preschool trial: allegations, interviews, and legal outcomes
The McMartin preschool trial produced no convictions; Ray Buckey’s retrial ended in deadlock in July 1990, and prosecutors declined another trial. Behind that outcome were disputed interview methods and competing allegations about how the prosecution had developed. Several surviving documents expose different stages of the process: a police appeal to parents, transcripts of interviews with children, a defense expert’s testimony, and a later civil appeal. Each had a different legal function. An investigative request, an interview statement, an expert opinion, and a judicial ruling did not carry the same evidentiary weight.
The police letter was dated September 8, 1983, the day after Ray Buckey’s arrest. Chief Harry Kuhlmeyer asked parents whose children attended the school to seek information about possible abuse. The letter named the suspect and described particular suspected conduct, photographs, and situations parents should inquire about. It requested a completed form and discouraged discussion outside the immediate family or contact with the accused family and school employees. This was an official effort to gather information, but its detailed allegations also reached families before any resulting statements from their children were collected.
The letter included a striking limitation. In capital letters, it said there was no evidence that school management knew of the situation, no detrimental information about the school’s operation had been discovered, and no other employee was under criminal investigation. That language fixes the scope of the police position at that moment. It does not establish what happened to any child. It does show that the original communication described a narrower investigation than the later prosecution associated with the McMartin preschool trial. Suspicions subsequently expanded beyond the single employee named in the letter.
The preserved interview excerpts show the interaction itself. In one, an 8-year-old boy initially said he did not remember an alleged game. Interviewer Kathleen MacFarlane invoked other children’s statements, appealed to the boy’s intelligence, and suggested that he might have watched through a window. He distinguished hearing a song from seeing a game. Later, when discussion turned to photographs, he repeatedly described a play camera while MacFarlane asserted that other children had identified a real one. The exchange records the adult introducing information and challenging the child’s distinctions; it does not independently verify the events under discussion.
A second excerpt pairs a 6-year-old girl with Dr. Astrid Heger. Heger referred to other children, introduced dolls and puppets, and asserted that touching had occurred. The girl repeatedly expressed uncertainty or denied remembering the suggested activities. The transcript matters because it preserves refusals and uncertainty alongside the adult’s persistence. These are selected excerpts, rather than every interview conducted during the investigation. Their evidentiary value lies in the observable sequence of prompts and responses, not in an assumption that two extracts establish the truth or falsity of every allegation in the case.
Defense witness Dr. Michael Maloney analyzed the interview methods in trial testimony. He said adults spoke much more than the children and that the children were initially willing and able to talk. In his view, this made the interviewers’ control of the exchange unnecessary and potentially contaminating. He described recurring patterns in nine interviews, including introducing sexual topics before children spontaneously raised them. His criticism concerned the source of information: whether a statement reflected an experience a child independently remembered or information introduced during the interview. That was a defense expert’s assessment, subject to the adversarial setting in which he testified.
Maloney also noted a limit in the recordings themselves. Some began with interviewer and child already engaged, so he could not determine what had happened before the recorded segment. He cautioned that direct, pressuring exchanges could lead children to acquiesce or point passively rather than supply their own descriptions. His testimony gave the McMartin preschool trial a specific dispute about evidence collection, rather than merely a conflict between accusing children and denying adults. The recorded process was itself evidence that the defense could challenge.
The 1992 civil decision in Buckey v. County of Los Angeles preserved another essential distinction. The Ninth Circuit described Peggy McMartin Buckey as acquitted of all criminal charges, then reviewed dismissal of her civil-rights lawsuit. Its background recited allegations from her complaint, including claims that officials mishandled the investigation and that participants had improper motives. Because the appeal concerned whether the complaint could proceed, those allegations were taken as true for that procedural purpose. Their appearance in a judicial opinion did not transform them into findings reached after a civil trial.
The appellate judges found her existing complaint insufficiently specific but reversed the dismissal so she could amend it. They identified a potentially available civil-rights theory while expressly declining to say whether such a claim could properly be filed. The McMartin preschool trial and the civil appeal thus ended at different legal thresholds. The criminal proceedings concerned liability for alleged abuse; the later appeal concerned whether Buckey could adequately plead an injury caused by a conspiracy under state authority. Allowing another pleading was not an award of damages or a final finding against the people she sued.
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Buckey v. County of Los Angeles, 968 F.2d 791 (1992), opinion reproduced by Public.Resource.Org — law.resource.org
- Harry L. Kuhlmeyer Jr., Letter to McMartin Preschool Parents (September 8, 1983), reproduced by Douglas O. Linder, Famous Trials — www.famous-trials.com
- Sample Interviews by Investigators with Former Students of the McMartin Preschool, videotaped-interview transcript excerpts, Famous Trials — www.famous-trials.com
- Dr. Michael Maloney, trial testimony for the defense, reproduced by Famous Trials — www.famous-trials.com
- Lois Timnick, Los Angeles Times courthouse report (July 28, 1990) — www.latimes.com
- Lois Timnick and Carol McGraw, McMartin Verdict: Not Guilty, Los Angeles Times (January 19, 1990) — www.latimes.com
- Lois Timnick, Charges Against Buckey Dismissed, Los Angeles Times (August 2, 1990) — www.latimes.com