Mean Justice (34 page)

Jagels made no mention of Mary Ann Barbour or the events that immediately preceded the dismissal. His office had already insisted that Barbour’s psychiatric history be kept secret and the records sealed in exchange for the dismissal of charges—thereby making sure that the Kniffens and McCuans could not get hold of them to use in their own defense during appeals.

“We have no doubt of the defendants’ guilt,” Jagels maintained when he announced the dismissal—a curious position, given that, legally, Palko and Walker were innocent.
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“But we have a moral and statutory obligation to prevent undue psychological damage to child victims.”

It sounded reasonable—the kids had to come first, even if it meant some members of the “ring” went free. What Jagels didn’t say was that sheriff’s detectives and
DA investigators, unconcerned about forcing the children to relive their molestations or to submit to unwanted medical examinations when it suited the prosecution’s purposes, continued to interview them in connection with other cases and in official attempts to keep them from being reunited with other family members.

The Kniffens and McCuans, meanwhile, were convicted and sentenced to a collective thousand years in prison—a sentence that prosecutors had promised to seek from the very beginning. Brenda Kniffen fainted in the courtroom when the guilty verdicts came in. Gindes’ presentation and the judge’s rulings so swayed the jury that the ten-month trial was decided in just a day and a half of deliberation.

Afterward, District Attorney Ed Jagels pronounced Andrew Gindes brilliant. His office gave glowing reviews to the sex abuse coordinator Carol Darling, who was said to be outstanding in her ability to persuade kids to disclose accusations against their own parents, then testify about them in court. At the same time, the DA assured the citizens of Kern County that his office was interested only in fair prosecution, not persecution of innocents.

“A person who is convicted of child molestation here,” Jagels vowed, “you can be very certain is a person who committed the crime.”

•   •   •

By the time Ed Jagels made this confident but ultimately incorrect pronouncement, Kern County appeared to be awash with massive rings of child molesters. The cases had multiplied quickly as the same techniques employed in the McCuan and Kniffen cases were used to “discover” a shocking number of similar conspiracies. Children questioned by county authorities were coaxed and prodded
into accusing several adults each and naming various child friends and relatives as fellow victims. Soon children were driven around and asked simply to point out the “bad people.” The newly named “victims” then would be scooped up for the same high-pressure interviews. Then the cycle would repeat with each round producing more allegations, more victims, more depths for the ever-widening investigation to plumb. Soon, hundreds of people with no prior criminal records came under scrutiny; dozens of children were removed from their homes and placed together in the same shelters and therapy groups. At least eight separate molestation rings, involving at least seventy-five adult suspects and approximately forty children, were uncovered in the space of a few months’ time in 1984.

The county placed the children in group therapy, where they would be encouraged to share their stories of abuse with one another—after which investigators, prosecutors and judges would marvel at the similarities in their stories. All seemed to talk of being drugged, hung from hooks, photographed and filmed having sex, and forced to watch movies of children being murdered. As in the Kniffen-McCuan case, though, no movies, pictures, books or other evidence was found where the children said it would be, or anywhere else for that matter. Attempts to stage orgy scenes recounted by some of the kids were comical—the equipment and numbers of people simply couldn’t fit in the rooms as described. After a while, the DA and the sheriff’s department stopped even trying to find evidence to corroborate what the children were saying (just as, years later, there would be no documented attempt to corroborate Jerry Coble’s statements about Pat Dunn).
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Yet despite the many shortcomings of these ring cases, the district attorney’s conviction record was stellar, the nation’s envy. Elsewhere around the country, such cases often ended in embarrassing dismissals, acquittals or protracted appeals. In Kern County, sentences exceeding fifty and one hundred years were the norm, with Ed Jagels and his hand-picked prosecutor, Andy Gindes, notching victory after victory with the twin mantras designed to overcome any doubts about the evidence: “We’re doing this for the children” and “Children don’t lie.” (The record remained untarnished for years, but after winning the first rounds of many appeals, the district attorney would experience some profound reversals of fortune in the ensuing decade.)

As the arrests multiplied, and more and more children were whisked away in the night without explanaton, hysteria slowly gripped the community. It was not just a fear of these rings of molesters preying on the young people of Kern County, but of the investigation itself, which seemed ever more sweeping in scope and power. Jobs were lost, lives and families ruined, futures destroyed, all by mere suspicion, regardless of whether charges were ever filed or not. Children were separated from parents for months, barraged by talk of sexual abuse by counselors, cops and other children, then returned home because authorities, try as they might, found no evidence—some kids just wouldn’t accuse, not matter how fervent the efforts to “help” them. Talk of false accusations slowly began to spread. Parents spoke of being afraid to hug or touch or punish their children. One woman was prosecuted for assault for trying to stop representatives of the district attorney’s office from physically abducting her daughter in a courthouse hallway—a
ploy they carried out so they could re-interview the child about her molestation at the hands of her mother’s ex-boyfriend. The mother had fully cooperated with the police investigation, allowing her daughter to be questioned at length, but she had also been warned by the child’s therapist to avoid forcing the girl to relive the trauma of her molestation over and over through repeated interviews. In Kern County, however, the DA wanted the kids to tell it over and over, no matter what parents might want or doctors might recommend, and though prosecutors had no legal right to seize and question this girl against her mother’s wishes, they did so anyway, dragging the screaming child onto a courthouse elevator while a deputy DA tried to distract the mother. This was no ring case—just a sadly simple one-adult, one-child molest—yet the authorities still jailed the mother for daring to interfere with their wishes. Only defense attorney Stan Simrin’s threat to file a kidnapping complaint with the FBI led to an abrupt dismissal of charges against the woman.
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Such excesses were seldom if ever made public at the time, and if they were, the news was drowned out by the overwhelming belief that child-molestation conspiracies were rife in Bakersfield.

As the rings one by one were brought to trial, a circus atmosphere prevailed, the courtrooms packed, the press coverage intense. Deputy DA Gindes turned one trial—the Pitts case, so named for one of its nine defendants, Ricky Pitts—into a virtual textbook of prosecutorial excess and misconduct. Throughout, he made continual and improper references to the Bible, arguing at one point that Jesus Christ himself would believe the children in this case rather than their parents. He repeatedly introduced inadmissible and erroneous evidence, then blamed
defense attorneys for the lapses. The judge on the case, Gary T. Friedman, joined in Gindes’ crusade, belittling defendants and their witnesses in front of the jury, mocking several of them for having tattoos. He sided with Gindes on virtually every legal point, even when Gindes was clearly in the wrong. Friedman, later censured for playing cruel jokes on defendants, overlooked Gindes’ frequent and sometimes blatant misconduct—letting the prosecutor berate and belittle defense lawyers before the jury, letting him imply the defendants had threatened the lives of witnesses when there was no such evidence, letting him bully children who claimed the allegations of molestation were false. At the same time, Judge Friedman skewered defense lawyers who had the temerity to object to Gindes’ behavior. The judge wept openly during one girl’s testimony for the prosecution, then later admonished a defense lawyer for not displaying proper decorum in court.

Later, after all of the Pitts defendants were convicted and each sentenced to as many as four hundred years in prison, three of the six child victims recanted. One specifically blamed Gindes and others in the DA’s office for forcing them to testify falsely that they had been molested, just as so many other ring “victims” were beginning to claim. The district attorney’s office coldly responded that the victims they had formerly championed must now be liars. Judge Friedman refused to overturn any of the convictions. The long sentences were richly deserved, he said, because of the unspeakable acts committed against children by the Pitts defendants. He had seen photographs of it—“Every perversion imaginable,” he said.

Bakersfield applauded the tough sentences. There was
just one problem: The photographs cited by Friedman did not exist.

Phantom photographs, phantom medical evidence, phantom conspiracies: The justice system of Kern County seemed so intent on convicting the monsters in its midst that anything seemed possible. And then, a year after the first ring trial, in March 1985, the impossible seemed to happen: The devil showed up in Kern County.

Suddenly, an explosion of allegations surfaced that wrapped Satan worshipers, human sacrifice and child molestation into one massive, terrible conspiracy. A “Satanic Abuse Task Force” was created by the sheriff’s department to deal with the problem—and to keep it secret, in order to avoid tipping off the devil worshipers, whose influence was said to extend to the highest corridors of power. A separate office in downtown Bakersfield was rented for the satanic investigators and their DA liaisons, a move both Sheriff Larry Kleier and District Attorney Ed Jagels agreed was necessary. Maps were put up with clusters of pushpins specifying suspected cult locations, burial sites, satanic churches and the like—though actual proof that such places existed had yet to be found. The absence of physical evidence did not deter the task force; its members were true believers, seasoned by their work against the molestation rings. Now Kern County was not only a haven for organized rings of child molesters, but also a hotbed of baby sacrifices, ritual murder, cannibalism and bizarre rituals of sex and degradation in “a bad church,” as the child victims all began to call it at their interrogators’ persistent urging.

The satanic investigation began with one child—a Nokes ring “victim” who had been interviewed many times before between June 1984 and March 1985 without
ever mentioning anything about ritual abuse or “bad churches.”
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But shortly after several Kern County social workers returned from a training seminar that hyped devil worship as a major element in child molestation (the discredited “true” story of satanic abuse,
Michelle Remembers,
was offered up as training material), this girl began speaking of it during the now-familiar suggestive interviews that were standard practice at the time.
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In short order, other victims began spouting similar stories, never mentioned in earlier interviews. The kids were all placed in the same county shelter for abused children, where they were seen by the same therapist, who firmly believed a huge satanic conspiracy was afoot in Kern County—and who did her best to encourage the children to confirm it. The resulting stories were remarkably similar: Children had been forced to drink blood, to eat human flesh, to submit sexually to monstrous characters in dark robes wielding inverted crucifixes and uttering terrible chants. One child stabbed “little bears, little wolves and little birds.” Women gave birth to babies solely for the purpose of human sacrifice, their infant chests torn open, their hearts ripped out, their broken bodies disposed of in fire pits. Twenty-nine babies had been murdered that way, investigators calculated from the children’s accounts. One child recalled how thirty-nine adults were present in a Bakersfield church, with a satanic minister presiding, when sixteen infants were murdered and cannibalized in just one night.

Eighty-five more adults were ultimately implicated, and more than sixty children came to be identified as victims, with many taken from their families. Dozens of baby murders were suspected, and the sheriff was intent on prosecuting them even if no bodies were ever found
in the furtive excavations of suspected ritual sites. The task force began to examine the older ring cases, including those already tried, for ties to the newly discovered conspiracy. With that, the investigation into Bakersfield’s satanic heart went full circle, returning to the children who launched the first molestation ring case: Jenny and Jane McCuan, and their guardian Mary Ann Barbour.

Soon after seeing the county therapist who tended to all of the other satanic victims, the McCuan girls began making similar accusations as well—something they had never before done in four years of interviews, testimony and promises that they had told everything. Based on their new revelations, the satanic task force began digging up a field outside the girls’ grandparents’ home in San Luis Obispo County, looking for victims of human sacrifice that the children promised were there. Secrecy was abandoned and the dig became a media spectacle, fueling new public hysteria as the residents of Kern County prepared for a battle for their very souls.

Nothing was found. Teams of forensics experts made similar excavations at homes and businesses throughout Bakersfield. Bones were triumphantly unearthed behind one house, creating a sensation—until it was ascertained the remains belonged to a family dog that had died of old age. There were no fire pits, no bad churches, no films or videos, no secret graveyards of ritual victims. A half million dollars in manpower and machinery failed, for the third time, to turn up any of the evidence the children described. At the same time, concrete proof that the new charges were utter fantasy surfaced time and again. In groundbreaking stories, the
Fresno Bee
reported that babies named by the children
as victims of human sacrifice were found alive, safely at home. Other supposed victims, it turned out, had been stillborn in hospitals. Suspects were described incorrectly, addresses proved fictional—the children’s, and thus official, accounts were riddled with obvious fabrications.