Mean Justice (33 page)

These new accusations came shortly after Alvin McCuan, the only person who had been arrested and charged so far in the case, asked his friend Scott Kniffen to be a character witness for him.

In short order, the accusations grew even worse. The girls started claiming they had been strung up from hooks in the Kniffens’ living room and raped while dangling in the air. The girls had been filmed having sex with adults and other children, and the movies and camera equipment were stored at the Kniffen household, they said. Each new revelation was promptly rewarded with ice cream and other treats.

By this time, the molestation “ring” included at least ten adults, and the investigation had reached a frenzied pace, unlike anything ever seen before in Kern County. A young deputy DA, Medalyian Grady, who had yet to prosecute a felony in her brief career, had inherited the case—an assignment she first received when Alvin McCuan was still the only suspect, with no hint of the massive allegations to come. The assignment of a neophyte to prosecute a molester was not unusual for the time—in that era, cases such as the initial child abuse prosecution of Alvin McCuan would have been handled as a misdemeanor, for sex crimes against children were considered “family problems.” But when Grady first reviewed the original McCuan case, she decided the traditional approach would be wrong, and she pushed her office for a precedent-setting felony prosecution.
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Hearing the little girls relate graphic sexual scenes most adults couldn’t imagine left her physically ill, and convinced her they were telling a terrible truth. “No five-year-old
child could know those things without having experienced them,” she would say after interviewing the girls, unaware that Velda Murillo had described the sex acts to Jane and Jenny, not the reverse. “How else could they know more about sex than I know?”
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Grady’s decision to handle the original case as a felony proved prophetic—and convenient, once the additional eight defendants were added. And so, the novice prosecutor, with the best of intentions and an admirable dedication to saving abused children, launched the first of the big “ring” cases to be pursued in Bakersfield—or anywhere, for that matter. It was the biggest criminal case to hit Kern County since Dana Butler was murdered and Police Commissioner Glen Fitts killed himself over it, dominating the news for weeks, and breaking in a particularly sensational manner. Over Grady’s principled objections, the DA and the sheriff invited newspaper reporters, photographers and news crews to accompany the six law-enforcement teams fanning out in Kern County as they made nine dramatic arrests early on the morning of April 8, 1982. Predictably, the resulting reports were blasted across front pages and on the evening news, sparking protests at the courthouse, widespread public revulsion, and demands that the authorities get tougher on child molesters.

Brenda Kniffen, her long blonde hair uncombed, her eyes still bleary from sleep behind her thick glasses, was standing in the kitchen, staring out the window while waiting for the morning coffee to brew when she saw the uniformed men with shotguns storm her house shortly after seven that morning. News photographers immortalized the moment. She still remembers young Brian wailing for her as she was sped away in handcuffs. The
two young boys were brought to the district attorney’s sex-abuse coordinator, Carol Darling, and her colleague Velda Murillo, who awaited them with cookies and milk and questions. Then the boys were interrogated by a detective and a deputy DA. Brian and Brandon were subjected to lengthy and suggestive questioning during this process. Their repeated denials that they had been molested were ignored until they agreed, under pressure, that they were abused.
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Placed in the care of Kern County and kept apart from their families—not just their mom and dad, but their aunts, uncles and grandparents, who had never been accused of doing anything wrong—Brandon and Brian came to believe their family had forsaken them and hated them. They became creatures of the government after that, their story changing over time in accordance with what prosecutors needed to prove. If prosecutors needed them to say they were brought to motels—something they had previously denied—then they were brought to motels. If money had to have changed hands, or pictures had to have been taken, then those elements, too, appeared in their stories despite previous denials. No one in law enforcement questioned these inconsistencies—so long as the accusations grew worse and more numerous. Only if the children backed off an accusation did the authorities begin to question their veracity, assuming that someone in their family had gotten to them. “If anybody is brainwashing children, it’s the family of the defendants,” Deputy DA Grady told reporters after one member of the Kniffen family complained about police tactics in the case. “They are lying about law enforcement.”

Even when the older McCuan girl, Jenny, told Grady flat out that Mary Ann Barbour had pressured her into
falsely accusing one of her uncles, the push to prosecute did not slack off. Jenny’s revelation came after she and her sister were placed in out-of-town foster homes for their safety, in the wake of Barbour’s constant claims that she and the girls were being followed and threatened with death. As soon as the girls were away from Mary Ann’s influence, Jenny began recanting. But when that happened, both girls were whisked right back to Mary Ann Barbour, and the recantations stopped—along with the talk of threats. Eventually, the DA grudgingly withdrew charges against the falsely accused uncle, though the fact that charges against one alleged molester had been manufactured seemed to cause no official concern.

“You just made a mistake, right?” Grady asked the little girl, who sat on the prosecutor’s lap as they spoke.

“It was just a mistake,” Jenny agreed.

“And that’s the only mistake you made, right?” Grady prodded further.

The child nodded, telling the prosecutor what she wanted to hear.
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It was a perfect illustration of a prosecutor’s tendency to view his or her own witnesses’ contradictions as honest and isolated mistakes with no overarching significance, while condemning a suspect like Pat Dunn’s inconsistencies as evidence of overall untrustworthiness and guilt. Despite the naked admission that Mary Ann Barbour had coerced a key witness into fabricating allegations that put an innocent man in jail and his children into custody, no questions were raised about the remaining charges. The case continued unabated against the others as if nothing had happened.
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Not even a total lack of corroboration of the girls’ stories—reminiscent of the lack of physical evidence in the Dunn case years later—slowed down the investigation.
The children described in detail where the pornographic films were kept, where the police could find the camera equipment used to photograph the orgies, where the sex toys were stored, and even where the hooks in the ceiling were supposed to be located in the Kniffens’ house; Jenny in particular had been quite specific about where these items could be found, pointing out rooms, closets and cupboards. But none of it was true—not a shred of physical evidence could be found where the girls said it would be. Nothing was ever found, even though the arrests had been secretly planned and carried out in order to preserve all this “evidence” the girls had described.
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Undeterred when it was proven there had never been hooks in the Kniffens’ home capable of supporting a child, the sheriff’s department responded by having Jenny stand in the living room with her hands extended over her head, as if suspended from the hookless ceiling, so a police photographer could capture the moment. The resulting photo, gripping and sad, was then entered into evidence by the DA, a powerful image for the jury to consider, though it illustrated something that could not have happened. Prosecutors later went to a local porn shop and bought several dildos to wave around as courtroom props—even though no such sexual devices ever turned up in any of the defendants’ homes.
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In an attempt to counter the dearth of corroborating evidence, Jenny, Jane and the two Kniffen boys were taken to a physician hired by the district attorney. Dr. Bruce Woodling, who then practiced in the coastal California town of Ventura, presented himself as an expert in determining if children had been sexually abused. Among the tests he used was one pioneered in Great Britain which he called the “Wink Test,” in which
the examiner would lightly rub a cotton swab against the patient’s anus. If the anus reflexively dilated (as opposed to constricting), Woodling claimed, it proved that child had been chronically sodomized. He also asserted that he saw scarring from molestation in the children—something other experts who would later look at his photos and reports could not see. As it turned out, in a case that would otherwise have pitted the word of four small children against their respectable and credible parents, Dr. Woodling’s seemingly irreproachable findings became the decisive evidence for prosecutors.
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What no one grasped at the time (or, rather, what no one among the defendants, judge and jury seemed to realize) was that there were no scientific studies to support Woodling’s interpretation of these tests.
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One of Britain’s foremost experts on the wink response in children has since testified that Woodling misused and misinterpreted the test, and subsequent studies have shown decisively that it is useless in determining whether children were molested—abused children and nonabused children alike often display the same “wink” responses. But at the time, when the science of child abuse was in its fledgling stage and new experts in the field were just starting to stake out their reputations, Woodling’s test was taken as gospel by police, prosecutors, judges and juries.

The problem was compounded because the DA’s office—which had essentially taken over control of the children’s custody and care from the county welfare department workers who normally handled such matters—adamantly refused to allow any non-prosecution doctors to examine the children, arguing that additional exams would be too traumatizing for the young victims.
By the time the case came to trial, the DA not only was prosecuting the case, but also deciding where the children lived, who could visit them, and who could examine them. No one appeared to be concerned that there might be a conflict of interest in allowing one adversary in a court case to act as parent, judge, therapist and social worker in deciding what was best for a key child witness’s welfare while also trying to hold together a very difficult prosecution.
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In 1983, when Ed Jagels took office as district attorney for Kern County, the Kniffens and McCuans already had been charged, but not yet brought to trial. By then, the constant flow of new and fantastic allegations had bloated the case to include an indictment of several hundred counts aganst the eight remaining defendants. Jagels replaced the novice Grady with a veteran sex-crimes prosecutor named Andrew Gindes, a brilliant but brittle attorney known for his zealousness and courtroom fireworks.

Gaunt, dark-haired and hollow-eyed, Gindes had moved to Bakersfield from neighboring Tulare County, where he had been embroiled in some controversy over the years, including the conviction of a young man for a murder he was later cleared of committing.
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As Jagels knew he would, Gindes made Kern County’s first molestation-ring case a personal crusade. Over the course of a marathon trial, the longest in Kern County history at the time, Gindes was repeatedly accused of withholding evidence from defense attorneys. He also fought successfully to keep the defendants from having their own medical expert examine the McCuan and Kniffen children. But then, without court permission or legal authority to do so, the DA’s office had the children
examined a second time by their own expert, Dr. Woodling, contradicting Gindes’ passionate arguments that any more of the embarrassing anal and genital examinations would traumatize the kids. Gindes later worked this incident to his advantage, asserting to the jury that the medical experts offered up by the defense ought not be believed, because they had not personally examined the victims—conveniently failing to mention he was the one who prevented such examinations in the first place.

Throughout the trial, Gindes displayed a ruthless streak that soon made him one of the most feared prosecutors in Kern County. In the midst of trial, for example, an aunt of the Kniffen boys innocently questioned one of them at a playground, asking, “Is it true?” (The boy answered, “No.”) Gindes responded by having the aunt criminally charged with obstruction of justice. Years later, when Brandon and Brian Kniffen recanted their accusations and said interrogators had coerced and confused them, they bitterly complained most about Gindes. They said he had bullied and manipulated them into testifying falsely against their parents and the others throughout the long trial. “He would slam books down, yell when we wouldn’t cooperate,” Brian Kniffen would recall years later. “He was demanding and scared us and wouldn’t take no for an answer . . . I wish I could talk to him now and ask him . . . why, why did he do that to me?”
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Perhaps most important for his case, Gindes persuaded a judge to keep jurors from hearing anything about Mary Ann Barbour’s mental problems, freeing him to make an astonishing argument to jurors. “Mary Ann Barbour, if anything, acted reasonably and rationally,” he declared of a woman who had been hospitalized for
being obsessed with molestation and for making death threats against her husband. “[She] never overreacted to anything.”
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That evidence of Mary Ann Barbour’s mental state could have a powerful impact in court became clear a short time later, when social worker Betty Palko and her boyfriend, Larry Walker, came to trial separately from the Kniffens and McCuans on the same charges. They succeeded in having the case moved from Kern County on account of overwhelming and negative publicity that presupposed their guilt, and a different judge ordered Barbour’s psychiatric records turned over to the defense as clearly relevant. Three days later, Kern County DA Ed Jagels stunned news reporters covering the case and its “overwhelming” evidence by announcing he was dismissing the charges against Palko, Walker and two remaining defendants because, he said solemnly, “These children have been through enough.”