Mike Kelley by John Miller

Author:John Miller [John Miller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2015-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

Such accounts, Howard Singerman wryly notes, ‘read as though Kelley had scripted them’.123 Ironically, the search for abuse devolved into behaviour characteristic of abuse when CII staff conducted extensive physical examinations, using a device called a colposcope to make detailed photographs of the children’s anuses and genitalia. (Here, by implying that the popular suspicions about his Arena series victimised him, Kelley aligned himself with the young CII clientele.) Based on the clinic’s wide-ranging findings, prosecutors expanded their charges to include Ray Buckey’s sister, Peggy Ann Buckey; his mother, administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey; his grandmother, school director Virginia McMartin; and teachers Mary Ann Jackson, Betty Raidor and Babette Spitler.124 Banners, placards and bumper stickers sprang up all over Manhattan Beach declaring: ‘I Believe the Children!’125

The news media amplified the sensationalistic nature of CII’s determinations. When reporter Wayne Satz broke the story on 2 February 1984 for KABC-TV’s evening news, the station’s ratings skyrocketed. (Shortly after, Satz entered into a romantic relationship with MacFarlane.)126 KABC took out a full-page advertisement for its investigative series in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that featured an image – almost in anticipation of Kelley’s Arena series – of a battered teddy bear. Other media outlets soon followed suit. Tom Jarriel, on ABC’s national television news programme 20/20, characterised the preschool as ‘a house of horrors’. People magazine called it ‘California’s Nightmare Nursery’. Time magazine ran the story under the headline ‘Brutalized’.127 The court case, however, had only just begun. When it concluded in 1990, it had become the longest and most expensive trial in US history. Ultimately, the prosecution failed to prove any of its allegations, but Buckey nonetheless spent five years in prison as mounting legal expenses bankrupted him and his co-defendants.128 Later, Judy Johnson, the mother who raised the first charges, was diagnosed with schizophrenia compounded by alcoholism. Prosecutors had withheld her most bizarre claim: that Ray Buckey could fly.129 Buckey was acquitted, and in that respect, at least, he was fortunate. Defendants in other ritual sexual-abuse cases had received multiple life sentences on equally flimsy evidence.

Even after the trial concluded, many in Manhattan Beach still refused to accept Buckey’s innocence. Citizens’ groups conducted extensive excavations in and around the preschool’s grounds, convinced that they would uncover a secret tunnel network. However, the only ‘tunnels’ to be found were those on the school’s playground: the brightly coloured wooden boxes that Ray Buckey’s father, Charles Buckey, had built for the children to crawl through.130

In his book The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (2013), Jesse Walker offers a simple topology of the subject. He discusses the enemy from above, from below, from inside and from outside. Like Kelley, he considers conspiracy theory to be myth, which does not mean that its narratives are necessarily false, but rather that they revolve around recurrent, culturally resonant ideas that can absorb all manner of suspicions and arrange them into familiar forms.131 Of the four types, Kelley focuses exclusively on the threat from within. This kind of threat is both the most familiar and the most alienating.

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