OHIO ASSOCIATION OF RESPONSIBLE MENTAL HEALTH PRACTICES

March 2001

By Mark Pendergrast and Eleanor Goldstein

Bruce Perkins of Waller, Texas, and Ray Souza of Lowell, Massachusetts, have a great deal in common. Both are devoted husbands, fathers, and grandfathers. Both are solid members of the middle class who have worked hard all their lives to support their families. And both have been convicted of sexually abusing their grandchildren despite a complete lack of evidence. Even though both men are almost certainly innocent, they face years of prison. How could two such miscarriages of justice occur in such similar manner, thousands of miles apart?

Both cases originated with and adult woman entering therapy. Bruce Perkins’ daughter-in-law, Trish, sought counseling in 1991 for depression and parenting problems. Her therapist told her that she displayed “symptoms” of sexual abuse, and if she did not remember being abused as a child, she had probably repressed those memories. With the aid of her therapist, Trish eventually visualized scenes in which her grandfather abuse her. She became very sensitive to what, according to her therapist, were signs of sexual abuse. After seeing her children playing doctor with friends, she grilled them about possible molesters, soon accusing several of her children’s’ playmates of abuse. Then suspecting an adult perpetrator, she asked her four-year-old daughter whether her grandfather Bruce had ever touched her. The child insisted that nothing had happened.

Convinced that Bruce Perkins had indeed molested her daughter, and that her daughter was afraid to tell her about it, Trish persuaded Bruce’s other daughter-in-law, Patty to question her four-year-old. Soon after, Child Protective Services was contacted, then the sheriff’s department. Although both children initially denied being abused, they eventually “disclosed” abuse after being questioned repeatedly by therapists, parents, prosecutors, social workers, and police, all of whom assumed that Bruce Perkins had molested the children.

Because sexual abuse of innocent little children is so horrifying, those accused of such a crime are often presumed guilty until proven innocent, a reversal of normal legal standards. And because few judges or jury members understand how preschoolers’ testimony can be seriously contaminated by repeated, coercive interview, many innocent people have been jailed, with the only evidence coming from the mouths of very young children.

Yet recent studies by Stephen Ceci at Cornell University and Maggie Bruck at McGill University have demonstrated that children—particularly preschoolers—will say just about anything to please an adult. Small children have active imaginations and, if properly coached and repeatedly led in particular direction (often using sexually explicit dolls), they will accuse almost anyone of sexual abuse.

In Texas, the jury heard from the well-rehearsed grandchildren how Bruce Perkins had lured seven children, including them, to his bedroom during his birthday celebration. While about 40 friends and relatives enjoyed themselves downstairs, Perkins supposedly stripped the children, smeared cake, ice cream, ketchup and mustard on them, then licked it all off. He also purportedly pushed Lego blocks inside them, (taking photographs of it all), then cleaned them, dressed them, and sent them downstairs without arousing any suspicion, and with none of the children saying anything.

Other allegations were even more preposterous. Perkins was supposed to have taken on granddaughter out to the chicken coop and forced her to have intercourse with their dog, after which he cut off the dog’s penis and squirted blood all over the child. All of this purportedly occurred in a 4’ by 4’ area.

No photographs were ever found. Four of the seven children did not even attend the birthday party. The dog is alive and well, with its penis intact. Bruce Perkins passed a lie detector test. Yet he was found guilty and is now serving a 30-year sentence in a Texas prison.

The Souza case began when their youngest daughter, Shirley Ann, entered therapy during her college years. Her counselor suggested that her problems did not stem from a near-date-rape, but must have come from repressed memories of sexual abuse. Obsessing over the possibility that her parents might have abused her, Shirley Ann dreamed that her father had raped her with a crucifix and that her mother, equipped with a penis, assaulted her. In the dream, Shirley Ann had no arms or legs. Her therapist interpreted this dream as firm evidence that Ray and Shirley Souza were child molesters. Frantically upset, Shirley Ann called her sister-in-law Heater, telling her to keep her children away from their grandparents.

The following events were all too predictable. Heather repeatedly questioned her four-year-old daughter about whether her grandparents had touched her, but she denied it. Dissattisfied, Heather took her to a therapist, who concluded that there was no evi

dence for abuse, noting that Heather seemed to be applying undue pressure. Frustrated with that result, Heather too her to a child abuse “expert,” Janine Hemstead, who validated that the little girl exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from sexual abuse.

As required by law, the suspected abuse was reported to the Department of Social Services. Meanwhile, another daughter, Sharon, had entered therapy and become convinced that she harbored repressed memories of how her parents had abused her in a satanic cult when she was a child. Sharon brought her five-year-old daughter to see Janine Hemstead. Given enough time and repeated interviews, both grandchildren eventually “disclosed” abuse. Two years after the supposed events, they testified how their grandparents had put them in a case in the basement, molested them with a machine as big as the room, and force them to drink a green potion. One granddaughter also told how Ray and Shirley had put their whole hands and head into her vagina.

Waiving their rights to a jury trial on the advice of their lawyer, the Souzas were found guilty by Judge Elizabeth Dolan, whose remarks for the bench indicated a predisposition to believe that the children were sexually abused. Judge Dolan said: “I’m not trying to be a smart mouth or anything…I’m not saying I know everything but, you know, I have heard a lot in this field over the years. And I’ve done a moderate amount of reading in this general subject area.” The children were allowed to testify with their backs to the defendants with the clear presumption that facing their grandparents would “retraumatize” them. Sentenced to nine to fifteen years, the Souzas have lived under house arrest for the last three years, pending their appeal. They must wear cumbersome ankle alarms and are subjected to ten phone calls a day from prison authorities, often in the middle of the night.

The Souzas and Perkins refuse to give in to bitterness or despair. Ray strongly believes that his grand children will realize one day that the abuse never happened. “They’re bright children and they have minds of their own. When nobody’s prompting them, they’re going to remember how things really were, and we’ll embrace.” Bruce Perkins, who spends much of his time in prison painting beautiful watercolors, is mainly concerned that his incarceration has been especially hard on his wife Carol. “We’ve been together since we were fifteen years old, and being without her is the worst part of this nightmare.”

    Ray & Shirley Souza                           Bruce Perkins

Before that other trial of the century came along, this was the trial of the century.

For size, for price, for outrage and outrageousness, you just couldn't beat the McMartin Pre-School case. Seven years in the making (and unmaking), 208 counts of child molestation right out of the pedophile's encyclopedia, seven defendants, 41 children--it was the Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza of criminal cases.

On and on, through L.A.'s Olympic summer of 1984, McMartin busted the tape with records of its own: L.A.'s longest preliminary hearing (a year and a half), its priciest prosecution ($13 million and change). McMartin would chew up seven years, six judges, 17 lawyers.

It was unimaginable that within the bright rooms, behind the kindly faces, dark things happened at the Manhattan Beach preschool. A secret cave for sexual games (investigators couldn't find it). Rabbits butchered on a church altar (no traces of blood turned up). Airplane rides for in-flight molestations (no records were found). Strangers molesting children (almost absurdly, children picked photos of actor Chuck Norris and city Controller James K. Hahn).

As O.J. Simpson's trial would, McMartin sundered friendships and family table talk. Did they do it, or didn't they? Did the kids make it up? Did the investigators encourage them

There were no convictions. None. Five of the seven defendants didn't even go to trial. Of the two who did, Ray Buckey, the only man among the defendants, had a hung jury in his first trial. He had a hung jury in his second trial. There was no third trial.

The other defendant who went to trial was his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, who died over the weekend—daughter of one defendant, mother of another and a defendant herself.

No one won in this case: not the children, not successive district attorneys, not the late Peggy McMartin Buckey, in spite of her acquittal. She spent her life savings on attorneys. One of them won a slander case against one of her accusers. She got a dollar.

In 1983, the year a mother called Manhattan Beach police to say her 2-year-old son had been molested at his preschool, the baby boomers were well into their own childbearing

and a pediocracy was emerging, more child-focused than even the boomers' parents had been.

Children were pure. One didn't drink or swear around them. One certainly didn't spank them. And the unspeakable act of molestation--children could not lie about such things. They could not make such things up.

Of course children lie. I lied. We all lied. We lied about not eating cookies even as we had tollhouse on our breath. But we also lied for the pleasure of creating our own reality--our imaginary friend, our dad's superhero strength, our magic car.

That was called imagination, and it was an enchanting element of being a child, like believing that Santa was real and your mom could fly. If it were not part of childhood, the author

of the Harry Potter books would still be a welfare mom.

But McMartin was different. The animal sacrifices could have come from some horror movie, but games like naked movie star, and naked cowboys and Indians--how could they make this up? I was new to The Times' newsroom, but not to molestation stories. Three years before, I'd written about a man wrongly convicted of molesting two boys. The boys had made up the story to get out of being punished. The parents went to the police, the police went to court, the man went to prison.

His conviction was expunged after the boys confessed to making it up. It turned out that an investigator had kept questioning the boys until she got the answer she wanted, and then taped over what didn't help the case.

Call it manipulation or zeal, doing the wrong things for the right reasons can be as corrosive as ignoring the problem itself and hurting the very children we seek to help. When perspective gets lost, so does the truth. We see it in the drug wars, the zero tolerance policies that expel a Texas girl for having Advil, a West Virginia boy for giving a cough drop to a friend, but seem not to discourage cocaine smugglers from trying to use a submarine to get their goods to market.

The victims of McMartin Syndrome cannot be counted: The preschool students themselves, damaged perhaps by sexual abuse and surely by the prosecuting of it. Americans from the San Joaquin Valley to small-town Tennessee, caught up in a decade of McMartin copycat witch hunts. Legitimate victims of abuse whose less flamboyant truths were lost in the backwash of skepticism about any such childhood horrors.

And McMartin is still making victims. Every weeping child who wasn't even born in 1983, who can't get a hug from a teacher who is too afraid of being accused of molestation, is one more victim of the McMartin Pre-School case.

Acquitted of all charges, Peggy McMartin Buckey never escaped the shadow of a preschool sex scandal.

1/8/01 PEOPLE Magazine

Though in later years Buckey volunteered in soup kitchens, the primary youngsters with whom she had close contact were Peggy Ann’s two children. “To the last minute,” says Myra Mann, who co wrote an HBO film on the case, “she was waiting for the parents or kids to knock on here door and say, ‘Peggy, we’re sorry.’ ”

Peggy McMartin Buckey

WENATCHEE WORLD Sunday, January 7, 2001 Ted Rohrlich Los Angeles Times

Day-care operator Peggy McMartin Buckey and her family became the closest things to witches that Southern California had in the 1980s.

For years, Buckey had led a quiet existence, helping her family operate the McMartin Pre-School in the seemingly idyllic seaside community of Manhattan Beach. Then, in 1983, she suddenly found herself plucked from obscurity and vilified as an embodiment of evil -- accused, with other family members, of molesting toddlers in her care.

Her acquittal on the charges, after the longest trial in the nation's history, provoked searing questions about how to protect children and to guard against the kind of sex-abuse hysteria that can lead to false accusations against caregivers, parents and others.

Authorities are still groping toward answers for these fundamental questions, which have now outlived Buckey, who died Dec. 15 at age 74 at a Torrance hospital after paramedics found her unconscious in her home.

But her case, and several like it across the country, including the 1994-1995 Wenatchee child sex abuse investigation, have left a legacy. They have changed the ways in which alleged victims are interviewed by authorities and the ways in which teachers, day-care providers and others interact with their young charges.

The case against Buckey and her family was the first in a series of high-profile child sex abuse prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s that collapsed for lack of persuasive evidence.

The cases were not typical of child sex crime prosecution, experts said, since those usually involved individual families and took place in the home. But their breadth guaranteed immense attention.

After the collapse of a case in San Diego, in which a church baby sitter was accused of molesting his charges, that county's grand jury offered an analysis of why so many such cases cropped up at the same time.

The grand jury blamed fallout from a well-intentioned federal effort to bring child abuse out of the closet. A federal law in the 1970s had given states a financial incentive to require teachers, doctors, nurses and police to report suspected child abuse or face punishment.

The states had obliged and such reports had quintupled. One result, the grand jury found, was the creation of "a child abuse establishment" whose economic interests had "fueled a certain amount of sex-abuse hysteria in which an accused individual's constitutional due process protections are commonly ignored."

Victor Vieth, director of the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse, a nonprofit affiliate of the National District Attorneys Association, said recently that the collapse of those cases left child abuse prosecutors "gunshy" for a while. "We realized we were getting beaten up because we didn't know what we were doing," he said.

One result: "We were ignoring potentially good cases because we didn't want to end up on '60 Minutes' or in the Los Angeles Times or other journals being criticized for the way we talked to kids."

A key problem in the McMartin case was the suggestive way in which children were questioned.

Social workers interviewed 384 children who had attended the preschool and 349 of them ultimately confided what the social workers called "yucky secrets."

This, for example, from a tape-recorded interview with an 8-year-old girl-- Child No. 184:

"We also need to remember that all the mommies and daddies got tricked," said the social worker. "You know how they got tricked?" "How?" asked the girl. "They thought it was a really good preschool," said the social worker. "They didn't know about that yucky stuff. So the mommies and daddies got tricked too, just like the kids. Remember I told you 183 kids?" "183," repeated the girl. "183 and they all got tricked," said the social worker.

Vieth's agency now trains prosecutors and investigators across the country to avoid suggesting to children the answers they hope to elicit and to learn how to corroborate their accounts in the absence of physical evidence. The vast majority of molestations do not involve penetrations, he said. But corroboration of peripheral information, such as the color of a room in which an alleged molestation took place, often gives detectives the upper hand in an interrogation of a suspect and leads to admissions.

Nine out of 10 accused molesters plead guilty, Vieth said.

In the aftermath of the failed child sex prosecutions, psychologists demonstrated the high degree to which small children, in particular, are susceptible to incorporating others’ suggestions.

Elizabeth Loftus, a University of Washington psychology professor and leading memory expert, said recently that "the 1990s were full of concerted efforts on the part of psychological scientists to find out how far you can go with kids without contaminating them."

She said she co-authored several studies "showing that you could get kids to falsely believe that they got their hand caught in a mousetrap and had to go to the hospital to get it removed, or that when they were younger they fell off a tricycle and had to get stitches in their leg. All it took was some suggestive interviewing."

Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of the prosecutions was in the alarm they conveyed and the changes they promoted among teachers and in the child-care industry.

Many teachers have adopted no-touch policies -- worried that an innocent hug could be interpreted as a sexual embrace.

Writer Margaret Talbot observed last year in The New Republic that workers at many day-care centers are now required to change diapers only when accompanied by another adult and are discouraged from holding toddlers.

"Our preoccupation with people who do assault children," she wrote, "has made us wary of people who would never assault them. These days we are all suspects."

Of all the figures in the case, including McMartin and Raymond Buckey, it was Peggy McMartin Buckey who lost the most, said Ray Buckey's attorney, Danny Davis.

"Peggy was spiritual and she never seemed concerned specifically about what would happen if they were convicted," Davis said. "But she lost everything. ... Now that she has passed away (I) would say, that's one we should be ashamed of."

Buckey, who testified that she had been molested as a child, had derived much of her self-esteem and identity from her job as a teacher and administrator, Davis said. When that was stripped from her, she never fully recovered, he said.

 Elizabeth Loftus