No one was ever convicted. That sentence contains the full weight of what happened in Manhattan Beach between 1983 and 1990: seven years of accusation, investigation, trials, and testimony involving 321 counts and 48 children, a case that consumed the lives of everyone it touched — the accused, the children, the families — and ended with nothing proven and nothing resolved.
The McMartin Preschool was a well-regarded institution in Manhattan Beach, run by Virginia McMartin and her family. In 1983, a mother whose son attended the school made accusations to local police against Raymond Buckey, a teacher at the school. The police investigation that followed sent letters to hundreds of families, alerting them to the accusations and asking them to question their children about potential abuse.
What came next was a catastrophe of good intentions and institutional failure. Children were interviewed repeatedly by therapists using techniques that investigators later identified as leading and suggestive — methods that could implant memories rather than recover them. Children began describing elaborate scenarios: ritual abuse in tunnels under the school, participation by prominent community members, acts that grew more extreme with each retelling.
By the time the case reached prosecutors, 321 counts had been filed against seven defendants. The grand jury indictment was the largest in California history. National attention focused on Manhattan Beach, and the McMartin case became the template for a wave of similar accusations at preschools and daycare centers across the country.
The first trial of Ray Buckey and his mother Peggy McMartin Buckey began on July 13, 1987, nearly four years after the original accusation. It lasted until January 18, 1990 — more than two and a half years, making it the longest criminal trial in American history at that time. The jury acquitted on 52 counts and deadlocked on 13. The cost to Los Angeles County exceeded $15 million.
Ray Buckey had spent five years in jail without conviction, unable to make bail. A second trial on the remaining counts ended on July 27, 1990, with a mistrial. The charges were finally dropped. Ray Buckey walked out of the legal system without having been convicted of anything.
The case had consequences that extended far beyond the courtroom. The Supreme Court case Maryland v. Craig, which established that child witnesses could testify via closed-circuit television rather than facing the accused directly, grew directly from the legal issues raised by McMartin. Federal funding for research into child abuse and child testimony increased dramatically. The way American courts handle child witnesses changed.
Archaeological excavations beneath the McMartin Preschool in 1990 found no tunnels — despite years of testimony from children describing them in detail. This was not a simple matter of children lying; it reflected something more disturbing about how memory works under pressure, how suggestion functions in an interview, and how institutions can amplify accusation into certainty before evidence is examined.
For the children who testified, the case was its own form of harm. Whatever had or had not happened to them at the preschool, they lived through years of repeated interviews, public scrutiny, and the weight of being the witnesses in a case the world was watching. For the adults who were accused and ultimately not convicted, the damage was irreversible.
The McMartin case is now studied in law schools and psychology programs as a foundational example of how child testimony must be handled, and how it must not. The preschool building was eventually demolished. The corner of Manhattan Beach Boulevard where it stood is now a parking lot — unmarked, indistinguishable, holding its history without explanation.