When it was over, Peggy McMartin Buckey spoke bitterly of the price she had paid in the longest and costliest trial in American history--one which, from a legal standpoint, she had won.
"I've gone through hell and now we've lost everything," she said in 1990 after she and her son, Ray Buckey, were acquitted of child molestation charges in a case that had opened the door on one of society's deepest taboos.
Buckey, who was 74, was pronounced dead Friday at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance after paramedics found her unconscious in the nearby home where she had lived before and after the three-year trial. The cause of death was not immediately available.
Buckey had been a driving force behind the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, which became the focus of a fast-spreading investigation into alleged child molestation in the fall of 1983.
The school had been founded by her mother, Virginia McMartin, a feisty, plain-spoken woman who died in 1995. But it was Buckey--a quieter, more overtly spiritual woman--who hired her son to work at the school and who carried out much of the administrative oversight.
Peggy McMartin Buckey, Ray Buckey and Virginia McMartin were among six people indicted in 1984 on 115 counts of child molestation. Ultimately, after ballooning to 208 counts involving 41 children, the case was whittled down to 65 counts of molestation and conspiracy against Buckey and her son.
Nothing about the McMartin case was simple, easy or fast. It cost taxpayers more than $13 million. The preliminary hearing alone took 18 months. The entire case took seven years to wind through the courts, and involved six judges, 17 attorneys and hundreds of witnesses, including nine of the 11 children alleged to have been molested.
The case made and ruined careers, and changed the way police departments, day care centers, schools and courts deal with child molestation charges. It was made into a TV movie--and no wonder. With its allegations of animal sacrifice, pornography and satanic-type rituals, it led not a few observers to compare it to the Salem witch trials.
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 Saturday. "But she lost everything. . . . Now that she has passed away, [I] would say, that's one we should be ashamed of."
