Mean Justice (32 page)

When she finally learned of it, long after her work was done in Kern County, all the missing pieces seemed to fall into place for her. The Dunn case had not been one of a few isolated examples, Laura decided, but part of an avalanche. It turned out there had been dozens, even hundreds, of innocent people harmed by blind investigative and prosecutorial zeal in Kern County. The examples were legion: On an almost unimaginable scale, evidence had been manufactured, witnesses coerced, facts twisted beyond recognition to fit government theories, evidence of innocence kept hidden from those accused and tried. Cops, prosecutors and social workers had taken as gospel truth the most outrageous—and
easily disproven—allegations of child molestation conspiracies, devil worship, human sacrifice and ritual murder, ruining untold lives in the process of their extraordinary, misguided investigation. The acts of official misconduct ended up filling hundreds of pages of judicial opinion, with the largest criminal investigation in Kern County history thoroughly discredited.

As far as the courts were concerned, however, none of this had anything to do with Pat’s case, and yet to Laura, it had everything to do with it. Understanding the justice system in this place—and the injustice it could produce and condone—was not possible without acknowledging these revelations. For they pointed to an official mind-set that, Laura would decide, in the end made Pat’s conviction as inevitable as the tides. Everything that troubled Laura about the Dunn case—and much, much worse—had already been endured, many times over, in the Witch Hunt cases. And for the longest time—fourteen years—it seemed no one cared a whit.

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The events that triggered the Bakersfield Witch Hunt occurred in January 1980, when Pat Dunn was still a school principal and Sandy was still Pat Paola’s trophy wife. It started in a neighboring county, where the authorities eventually dropped the case for lack of evidence—a telling detail all but forgotten in the maelstrom of events that followed.

It started small, as such things often do, with a little girl named Jenny McCuan, and an obsessed woman named Mary Ann Barbour.

Jenny was six then, a precocious and bright child, as was her three-year-old sister, Jane.
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They were the seemingly
normal kids of seemingly normal parents living in a nondescript Bakersfield tract home. Alvin McCuan was a railroad worker. His wife, Debbie, fifteen when she married Alvin shortly before Jenny’s birth, ran a day-care center at her home. It was licensed and regularly inspected by the Kern County welfare department, and nothing untoward was ever observed by authorities, parents or children who attended. The McCuan children played with the other neighborhood boys and girls; Jenny did well in school, where her teachers noticed nothing unusual about her at all.

But after a visit to her grandparents’ home in San Luis Obispo County on the Central California coast, Jenny complained that her Granddad Rod Phelps—Debbie McCuan’s stepfather—had fondled her sexually. She made this complaint not to her own parents, but during a visit with her “stepgrandmother,” a troubled thirty-seven-year-old woman named Mary Ann Barbour. Mary Ann was the wife of Gene Barbour, Debbie McCuan’s second stepfather, and though she was not actually related by marriage or blood, Jenny and Jane considered Mary Ann a grandparent. The girls often visited and stayed overnight at the Barbour house.

For years, Mary Ann Barbour had been concerned about Jenny and Jane being molested, and she made a habit of closely inspecting their vaginas for signs of bruising or redness during visits. She also questioned them about molestation. Now, finally, after two years of amateur gynecological examinations and pointed sexual questioning, Jenny said her Grandfather Rod had molested her, just as Mary Ann had always feared. She immediately took the girl to a doctor, who found bruising and swelling and concluded Jenny had, indeed, been molested.
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Mary Ann then told Jenny’s parents and reported the matter to the authorities in Bakersfield.

A Kern County Sheriff’s detective and a social worker interviewed Alvin and Debbie, found them completely cooperative, and secured their promise to keep the girls away from Rod Phelps. Then they interrogated their suspect. Sobbing, Phelps admitted to molesting Debbie McCuan when she was a teenager, but denied doing anything to Jenny. Jenny, for her part, when interviewed by Kern County authorities, denied that anything had happened, but after lengthy questioning by a social worker named Velda Murillo—who began the interview by telling Jenny that she
knew
the girl had been molested—Jenny finally agreed that Phelps had fondled her. Later, after more questioning, Murillo reported that Jenny described other sex acts with Phelps, including intercourse.

Velda Murillo, who would soon become a central figure in the Witch Hunt cases, shared with a small but influential cadre of Kern County colleagues the belief that the use of leading and suggestive questions was not only acceptable, but essential as the best way to overcome a child’s natural tendency to deny being molested. Fear, embarrassment and a desire to protect their relatives, even abusive ones, would lead child victims to deny that anything happened—unless they were pushed, Murillo believed. This approach, coupled with the credo that “children never lie” about molestation when they claim it occurred, became the hallmark of child sexual abuse cases in Kern County. When officials suspected a child had been abused, the approach in Kern County boiled down to this: Questioners simply wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The problem was, the social workers, sheriff’s investigators and prosecutors who believed this were dead wrong. This strategy has since been revealed to be the absolute worst way of questioning children. Study after study has shown that such aggressive, leading questioning often generates false statements by children, not only when it comes to allegations of molestation, but on any subject.
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Young children may try to be truthful, but once subjected to suggestive questioning by adults in authority, they can have difficulty separating genuine recollections from suggested ones. Children have a tendency to say what they think adults want to hear, and Murillo left no doubts about what she wanted her interviewees to say. Because her sessions alone with Jenny and other children she spoke with during the Witch Hunt were never recorded, and she seldom wrote reports herself detailing who said what during these interviews, no one knew exactly how she got kids to level their accusations until many years later, when she was subpoenaed and required to testify about her practices. It turned out the common practice in use during the Witch Hunt went like this: Murillo would lock herself in a room with a child thought to have been molested and “help” him or her recount the abuse by graphically describing an act of molestation, after which she would urge the child to agree that it had occurred. Once this process was completed, Murillo would next brief a sheriff’s investigator, relaying the “disclosures” she had just obtained from the child. Then that investigator would question the child again for the record and file a report on the results, or simply rely on Murillo’s “filtered” account. In either case, the report would be written in such a way that a reader would be led to believe that it was the
child
who first described the acts of sexual
abuse, not the social worker. If during a follow-up interview a child failed to repeat the explicit and often sensational allegations Murillo reported, the investigator would remind the child of “the truth” they had previously “told” Murillo, so that they would not waver from the initial story. A child who subsequently denied being molested simply would not be believed. In such cases, it would be assumed that a molester or other relative had pressured or threatened the child into withdrawing the allegations; it never occurred to the authorities that it might be the investigators themselves applying the pressure on children to level accusations in the first place.
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Although Kern County investigated the case, San Luis Obispo County authorities ultimately prosecuted Rod Phelps, as the molestation was alleged to have occurred in their jurisdiction. The case later was dropped when Jenny refused to testify and again denied anything had happened. While Kern County authorities still believed Phelps to be a child molester, they were satisfied at the time that Debbie and Alvin McCuan would protect their daughters from future abuse. Jenny had clearly stated only her grandfather had harmed her, no one else.

Mary Ann Barbour, however, was not satisfied. She insisted to the sheriff and welfare authorities that the children had to be removed from the McCuan home for their own safety. The detective on the case considered her claims irrational, and perhaps he was right: Barbour was soon involuntarily admitted to a county mental hospital after threatening to stab her husband, and complaining of being unable to eat or sleep, obsessed with molestation and profoundly depressed. Doctors initially diagnosed her as delusional, but after a week, she was sent home with nothing more than sleeping pills.
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Mary Ann came home in January 1980 still obsessed and convinced that Jenny and Jane were at risk and that their parents were part of the problem. When the Kern County Sheriff’s Department and social workers wouldn’t do anything more, she called Betty Palko, a county adoptions worker she knew, and asked her to close down Debbie McCuan’s day-care center. Palko arranged an unannounced inspection by another social worker, but nothing amiss could be found. When the matter was not pursued further, Mary Ann decided Palko must be part of a criminal plot as well. When she found out that Palko’s boyfriend, Larry Walker, worked at the railroad yard with Alvin McCuan, and that the two couples sometimes played cards together, she became convinced that there was indeed a conspiracy at work.

Eighteen uneasy months passed, with Mary Ann continuing to question and examine Jenny and Jane during every visit, their parents unaware of the weekly inquisitions. Then, shortly after making contact with a child-abuse crusader who had close ties to the Kern County DA and a firm belief in the existence of large-scale molestation conspiracies, Mary Ann made a new, far more dramatic report to the authorities.
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This time, Jenny and Jane, ages eight and five, both were victims. And this time, their father, Alvin McCuan, was accused along with Grandfather Phelps, putting the case squarely in the hands of Kern County authorities for the first time. Velda Murillo again questioned the girls in her usual way, and emerged from the interview with descriptions of terrible sexual abuse by their father, something Jenny had previously denied. The girls were taken into protective custody and placed in a county-run shelter for abused children, while Alvin McCuan was promptly arrested. When
Debbie McCuan—who had not been accused as yet—referred sheriff’s investigators to her lawyer instead of coming in for an interview, the district attorney responded by seeking a court order removing Jane and Jenny from her custody. Then, despite her history of mental problems, Mary Ann Barbour received custody of the girls.

During Jenny and Jane’s first interviews with Velda Murillo, the only molesters mentioned were the father and grandfather. Jane in particular was quite specific in saying only her father and grandfather had molested her and her sister. “Nobody else ever tried to do those things,” she said. It was a statement that the authorities would soon ignore.

For after Jenny and Jane moved into the Barbour home, it seemed just about everyone Mary Ann Barbour feared, blamed or resented was eventually accused of molesting the girls: Debbie McCuan, whose continued visitation rights with the girls rankled Mary Ann; the social worker Betty Palko, who had not closed down Debbie’s day-care center, and her boyfriend; and the girls’ uncles Larry and Tom McCuan. The sheriff’s department held off making any more arrests while they investigated, wondering just how big the case might get, hoping to lull their suspects into a false sense of security.

Mary Ann, meanwhile, again unable to sleep, kept the girls up all night with her several times, and then breathlessly called social workers and sheriff’s detectives with new revelations from predawn question-and-answer sessions. She began claiming she was being followed and threatened. She said Betty Palko appeared in a Halloween costume, threatening to “wipe out” the girls. Over time, she made many more revelations—that the girls had
been involved in child pornography, bestiality and orgies; that they had been sold as sex slaves at motels by their own parents; that they had been shown snuff films in which children were murdered, with a narrator pronouncing, “This is what happens to little girls who talk.” She also said that Palko, in another threatening conversation, had called the girls “sow sluts,” a supposed devil worshiper’s term, and an ominous hint of the satanic allegations that were soon to blossom in Kern County.
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When questioned by a sheriff’s investigator, the girls at first denied these new and sometimes patently absurd statements—in other words, Mary Ann said it, but the girls didn’t. After spending more time alone with Velda Murillo, however, the girls started repeating the allegations and adding to them. The pornography, snuff films and orgies were all true, the girls finally agreed, their stories growing increasingly grotesque, with detectives and prosecutors assuming every word to be true and to have originated with the girls, not with Mary Ann Barbour. Any official who expressed doubts about the case was silenced by subtle intimidation and veiled threats that they, too, could fall under suspicion.
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On April 2, 1982, long after their father was arrested and charged, Jenny and Jane accused Scott Kniffen, an inventory manager for a diesel company, and his wife, Brenda, a Sunday-school teacher, of being involved in the orgies and molestations as well. The Kniffen name had never come up before, though the girls had been interviewed countless times by then. Indeed, just six months earlier, the girls had firmly stated that their father and grandfather were the only ones who had ever molested them. Now, though, the girls said not only were the Kniffens child abusers, but their two young sons,
Brandon and Brian, who the girls knew and had played with, were victims as well.