Satanic ritual abuse at the McMartin Preschool

Satanic ritual abuse at the McMartin Preschool
	FALSE
	"Teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, sexually abused hundreds of children in satanic rituals, including in secret tunnels beneath the school."
Domain	Crime & Public Safety
Tactic	Conspiracy Theory; Fabrication;
Era	Historical
First seen	1983
Origin	A parent's complaint to police in Manhattan Beach, California, August 1983
Last reviewed	2026-10-26
	Further reading: books on Crime & Public Safety

The McMartin Preschool case was a criminal investigation and prosecution in Los Angeles County that ran from 1983 to 1990. Staff at a family-run preschool were accused of abusing hundreds of children in bizarre satanic rituals. After years of investigation, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in US history up to that time ended without a single conviction. The case is now widely regarded as a product of moral panic, contaminated interviews with young children and sensational media coverage. It became the most famous example of the "satanic panic" that swept the United States and other countries in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The claim

The allegations began with ordinary abuse claims and grew into extraordinary ones. Children were reported to have described being molested, photographed and taken to secret rooms and tunnels beneath the school, as well as to churches, cemeteries and airplanes. Accounts included animal sacrifices, satanic ceremonies, flying witches and other impossible events. Investigators and many parents came to believe that an organized network of abusers was operating through the school.

Origin

In August 1983, Judy Johnson, the mother of a two-year-old boy who attended the McMartin Preschool, told police she believed her son had been molested by Ray Buckey, a teacher at the school and the grandson of its founder, Virginia McMartin. Her later accusations grew increasingly implausible. She was subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and died in 1986.

In September 1983, the Manhattan Beach police chief sent a letter to about 200 parents of current and former students. It named Buckey as a suspect and asked parents to question their children about possible abuse, describing specific acts. The letter caused alarm across the community.

How it spread

Many children were referred to Children's Institute International, a Los Angeles abuse-therapy center, where staff interviewed around 400 children. The interviews, many of them videotaped, used techniques that are now recognized as deeply flawed: repeated leading questions, anatomically detailed dolls, praise for disclosures, and suggestions that other children had already "told." Children who denied abuse were often pressed further. The center reported that more than 350 children had been abused.

Media coverage was intense and largely uncritical in the early years. In 1984, seven people, including Ray Buckey, his mother Peggy McMartin Buckey, his grandmother Virginia McMartin and his sister Peggy Ann Buckey, were charged with hundreds of counts of child abuse.

The case occurred at the height of a wider panic. The 1980 book Michelle Remembers, later discredited, popularized claims of satanic ritual abuse. Talk shows and news programs featured "experts" warning of secret satanic networks, and similar day-care abuse cases arose across the United States and abroad.

How it collapsed

In 1986, a new district attorney dropped charges against five of the seven defendants, citing a lack of evidence. Ray Buckey and Peggy McMartin Buckey went to trial in 1987.

The trial lasted almost three years. In January 1990, the jury acquitted Peggy McMartin Buckey on all counts and acquitted Ray Buckey on 52 of 65 counts, deadlocking on the rest. Several jurors later said the videotaped interviews had made it impossible to know what the children actually remembered. Ray Buckey was retried on some of the remaining counts later that year; that jury also deadlocked, and prosecutors dropped the case. By then he had spent about five years in jail without bail. The prosecution had cost an estimated $15 million.

Searches for the tunnels, including excavations around the school, produced no convincing evidence that they existed. In 1992, the FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, a specialist in crimes against children, published a report finding no evidence that organized satanic ritual abuse networks of the kind described in such cases existed.

In 2005, Kyle Zirpolo, who had been a child witness in the case, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that he had never been abused and that he had told interviewers what he thought they wanted to hear.

What the evidence shows

There is no credible evidence that satanic ritual abuse took place at the McMartin Preschool. No defendant was convicted. The extraordinary elements of the allegations were impossible on their face, and the more ordinary allegations could not be separated from the effects of suggestive interviewing. The case is now taught as a cautionary example in child-forensic interviewing, psychology and law.

None of this means that child abuse is rare or that children who report abuse should not be believed. It means that interviewing methods matter, and that once panic takes hold, investigators can produce the very accounts they are searching for.

Why it spread

A real fear, child abuse, was combined with a cultural panic about satanism.
A police letter suggested specific acts to hundreds of families before any facts were established.
Children were questioned repeatedly with leading techniques, which can produce false accounts in young children.
Early media coverage treated accusations as facts, and skeptics risked being accused of not caring about abused children.

Lessons for readers

The way a question is asked can shape the answer, especially with children.
When claims grow more extraordinary over time, that is a reason for more scrutiny, not less.
Moral panics often silence doubt by casting skeptics as defenders of evil.

Sources

Kenneth V. Lanning, Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse, Federal Bureau of Investigation (1992).
Kyle Zirpolo, as told to Debbie Nathan, "I'm Sorry," Los Angeles Times Magazine, 30 October 2005.
Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (1995).
Paul and Shirley Eberle, The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial (1993).