When Satan Wore a Cross by Fred Rosen

Author:Fred Rosen [Rosen, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Murder, General
ISBN: 9780061755941
Google: FSjcPvUsXUQC
Amazon: 0061239860
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2007-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The Satanists

Suddenly, it was June 1692 in damp Salem, Massachusetts. Innocent people were being accused of satanic abuse. Only it wasn’t. It was August 1983 in beautiful, sunny Southern California.

In the Los Angeles suburb by the sea, Manhattan Beach, seventy-nine-year-old Virginia McMartin, fifty-nine-year-old Peggy Buckey, and her twenty-eight-year-old son Ray Buckey were accused by the mother of one of their preschoolers of sexually abusing and torturing children in satanic rites at their Manhattan Beach day care center. It was about as bizarre a story as any to come down the crime pike.

The prosecutor, the L.A. District Attorney’s Office, relentlessly pursued the accused. The case snowballed as outside “experts” counseled most of the children at the day care center into believing they had all been victimized. That led to the DA charging the defendants and bringing them to trial twice in 1989 and 1990, for sexually abusing the children under their care. Both of the trials ended in hung juries. After the second trial, Los Angeles DA Ira Reiner wisely dropped all charges.

The McMartin Preschool abuse trials turned out to be the longest and most expensive criminal trials in American history. Fueled by the baseless charges of a woman who it turned out had emotional problems, the elected representative of the citizens of Los Angeles County had spent seven years of taxpayers’ time and $15 million of their money investigating and prosecuting a case without any convictions. When it was all over, the victims were twofold: the kids who had implanted memories of satanic sexual abuse by the so-called experts, and the defendants whose lives and careers were ruined by the baseless charges. Ray Buckey spent five years in jail without bail, waiting for the trial.

But people in California and the rest of the country were only too ready to believe the satanic charges they heard during the McMartin Preschool trials. The media diligently complied, following every turn of the trials and sensationalizing them whenever they could, which only served to obscure the truth—a national epidemic of satanic abuse cases began to be reported. From coast to coast, stories emerged of children being beaten, sexually abused, tortured, and in some instances, used as human sacrifices by satanic cults.

Hard evidence being at a premium, most if not all of these cases would eventually prove to be specious. That made no difference. A conservative social climate swept through the United States in the 1980s, where people were wont to believe the worst in their neighbors. The same thing had happened in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

The Salem witch hunt murders started when a West Indian slave called Tituba performed magic tricks for the daughters of Samuel Parris, pastor of Salem Village. Eventually, the circle for which she performed widened to include other curious friends. But Tituba’s magic had the curious effect of making some of the girls act irrationally.

A local doctor was called to treat the young women. A doctor in 1692 really was worse than no doctor at all. Dr. Staunch Protestant White Guy pronounced the girls bewitched.

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