The McMartin preschool ran a satanic ritual-abuse ring that molested hundreds of children in secret tunnels

The case people made, stated fairly

It is easy, decades on, to treat the believers as hysterics. That is unfair to how the case looked from inside it, and understanding why it convinced so many is the point of the exercise.

The subject was the worst thing a parent can imagine. The alleged victims were small children, and the accounts came not from cranks but from trained therapists and a specialized institute presenting what children had told them. When hundreds of children appear to describe similar mistreatment, the pattern looks like independent corroboration, and the humane, protective instinct is to believe them. Refusing to do so felt, at the time, like siding with abusers.

The details were also specific and consistent enough to seem beyond invention. Children named rooms, described being touched, and used the anatomical dolls to demonstrate. Parents who watched their own children produce these statements were not lying, and their certainty was real. Set against that, a preschool teacher and his family protesting innocence looked, to frightened parents, exactly like what guilty people would do.

Hundreds of children, expert interviewers, and terrified parents all pointing the same way. To the people living through it, disbelieving the children was the unthinkable option, not the cautious one.

That is the case at its strongest: not that tunnels were ever found, but that a large number of children, guided by professionals, told stories that a community of loving parents found impossible to dismiss. Anyone who pretends that was obviously absurd in the moment is flattening a genuine and agonizing dilemma.

Where the claim breaks down

The protective instinct was right; the conclusion it was steered toward was not. The ritual-abuse ring described at trial did not withstand the two things that matter most: physical evidence and a close look at how the accounts were produced.

The accounts were not independent. Nearly all of them passed through the same interviewing process at Children's Institute International, which used anatomical dolls and repeated, leading, rewarding questions. Recordings of those sessions, played in court, showed interviewers coaxing denials into accusations, and jurors afterward pointed to exactly this as the reason they would not convict. Later research drove the point home: a 1998 experiment that copied the McMartin technique got a majority of preschoolers to make detailed false claims. Hundreds of similar stories filtered through one coercive method is not hundreds of confirmations; it is one method repeated hundreds of times.

And the physical claims failed. The tunnels were dug for and not found; official investigations reported none beneath the building. No child pornographytied to the defendants was ever located despite extensive searching, and no animal remains or ritual sites turned up. Some of the children's statements, flying witches, hot-air balloon trips, being flushed through pipes, were physically impossible, which is not a minor embarrassment but a signal that the process was manufacturing fantasy rather than recovering memory.

The legal outcome reflects all of this plainly. Prosecutors dropped five defendants for lack of evidence, two juries declined to convict on the rest, and the state gave up rather than try a third time. No one was convicted. Peggy McMartin Buckey and Ray Buckey were acquitted or had their charges dismissed, and are entitled to be described exactly that way: never convicted of anything.

How the interviews built the story

It is worth dwelling on the interviews, because they are the engine of the whole case and the clearest lesson it left behind. The children did not arrive with these stories. The stories were, in large part, built inside the interview room.

The technique moved from open questions to strong suggestion. An interviewer might tell a child that other children had already said something happened, praise the child for “helping,” treat a denial as something to work past rather than accept, and invite the child to pretend or show on the doll what a teacher did. To a three- or four-year-old, who reads adult approval as a guide to the right answer, this is not neutral fact-finding. It is a script with a preferred ending, and small children are extraordinarily good at supplying the ending an adult clearly wants.

That is why the impossible details matter so much. Once an interview can produce a tunnel that is not there and a witch who cannot fly, it has demonstrated that it can produce anything, and the ordinary-sounding accusations lose the credibility that the fantastical ones destroyed. The method could not separate what a child had experienced from what a child had been led to say, and so it poisoned the reliable and the invented alike.

When the same process that yields flying witches also yields the molestation counts, the counts inherit the doubt. A method that cannot tell memory from suggestion cannot be the foundation of a conviction, and two juries agreed.

The honest reading is not that every child was fine and nothing was ever wrong; it is that the interviews made the truth unrecoverable and invented a satanic ring that never existed. Both juries and the prosecutors' own retreat point to the same conclusion.

Why it took hold

McMartin was not an isolated madness. It sat at the center of a national wave, and it caught for reasons that recur whenever fear and children meet a ready-made villain.

It rode a panic already primed. The 1980 book Michelle Remembers and a spreading belief in satanic ritual abuse had taught the public to expect hidden cults inside ordinary institutions. McMartin did not have to invent that fear; it only had to seem to confirm it, and a story about robes and tunnels under a suburban preschool fit the template exactly.

It was morally armored against doubt. Because the alleged victims were children, skepticism carried a social cost: question the accounts and you risked being cast as a defender of molesters. That pressure silenced caution at the moment caution was most needed, and let a flawed process run unchecked for years.

And it was amplified relentlessly. Tunnels, satanic rites, and hundreds of child victims make unforgettable television, and saturation coverage kept the lurid version in front of the country far longer and far louder than the later, quieter finding that none of it checked out. By the time the acquittals arrived, the frightening story had a decade's head start on the boring truth.