We Believe the Children by Richard Beck

Author:Richard Beck
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2015-06-02T23:00:00+00:00

What else? “There were a total of 49 photo lineups that were shown,” Gits said. “Presumably, unless the police department was making up suspects, somebody had pointed to each one of the persons in the 49 photo lineups.” In addition, eighty-two separate locations, including four churches, “two food markets, two car washes, two airports, one photography studio, one exercise club, and one national park” had been searched. From the preschool police had seized twenty blankets, twelve items of children’s clothing, nine rags, four towels, sheets, underpants, sponge mops, spiral notebooks, and soil samples.17 They reviewed customs records, real estate filings, and utility records, and they sifted through thousands of pornographic images. This search, Gits said, had turned up no corroborative evidence whatsoever. “So we believe the money spent was well worth it,” he said.18

Gits was able to make a few brief, sarcastic references to the satanic allegations because it is during the opening and closing statements that attorneys enjoy the most rhetorical freedom. The interactions between attorneys and witnesses that make up the majority of a criminal trial, however, are bound by a much narrower set of guidelines. In dropping charges against five of the seven McMartin defendants, Ira Reiner had also dropped the charges associated with those child witnesses whose testimony had provoked so much controversy during the preliminary hearing. Of the hundreds of children interviewed at CII, only thirteen were scheduled to testify at trial, and prosecutors intended to be much more careful about the kinds of testimony they solicited from these witnesses. It was important to avoid any more headlines about Chuck Norris’s participation in satanic rites. As one report noted, a case that had originally made headlines as the “crime of the century” was now being presented as a “vanilla 288(a),” meaning, simply, “lewd and lascivious acts on a child under 14 years of age.”19

Dropping these charges allowed prosecutors to avoid talking about some of the work they had been occupied with during the previous three years. With few exceptions, an attorney may only ask a witness about charges that directly pertain to that witness, meaning that much of the substance of the McMartin investigation would make no appearance at the trial. On the one hand, it is definitely better to be charged with molesting thirteen children than to be charged with molesting twenty or four hundred of them. On the other hand, the prosecution’s lean new charging document meant the jury would not hear much of the information that made the McMartin investigation intelligible, that it would be insulated to the greatest possible extent from the skepticism that was beginning to circulate more freely in Los Angeles. A trial is a world of its own, and this is good and appropriate for the law but not so good for some other things.

The trial settled into a rhythm. One by one, each of the prosecution’s complaining child witnesses testified, with parents appearing afterward to talk about nightmares and behavioral changes. One child told Rubin about being made to play naked movie star.

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