The underground "tunnels"

of the McMartin Preschool

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This essay is based primarily on an article by John Earl called "The Dark Truth About the 'Dark Tunnels of McMartin'." It appeared in the periodical Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, Vol. 7, #2. ₁

Background:

"McMartin" was one of the first Multi-Victim Multi-Offender (MVMO) child abuse cases. At 6 years duration, it was the longest US criminal trial in history. At a cost to the state of $15 million, it was the most expensive. No convictions were obtained. It has become the most famous case of its type. More detailed information is available.

During late 1983 and early 1984, the Children's Institute International (CII) counseling agency interviewed hundreds of children who had attended the McMartin preschool. 360 were eventually diagnosed as having been abused. First one, and then many of the kids disclosed being led down through trap-doors in the floor of the preschool and taken through underground tunnels. They described some tunnels as leading to a nearby building, where the children were loaded into a vehicle and taken to another location (sometimes via an airplane flight, train or hot air balloon to another city) and abused. Other tunnels allegedly led either to an underground chamber or above ground room where they described being subjects in pornographic photographs and being sexually abused.

The first suggestion of underground tunnels and secret rooms may have emerged in 1994-FEB during the interview of a former student by CII. He said " ...like somehow I can't remember. I'm not sure about. Ah, there was a room I wasn't suppose to go in or something....I'm making this up. I'm not sure. Yeah, I can see it, I think." At the preliminary hearing, he testified how Ray Buckey and the other teachers took him to play "Naked Movie Star" (kiddie-porn) games every weekday. In reality, Ray was not at the school until after the boy had graduated. He recalled that the secret room was the size of a classroom was located to the east of the school building and was accessible by a trap door and tunnel.

The existence of tunnels has been hotly debated since the mid 1980's. If there were tunnels in McMartin, then at least part of what the children said was true; the rest of their testimony would then be much more credible. If no tunnels existed, except in fantasy, then the rest of the children's testimony may also be unreliable. To believe in the tunnels has become almost a required article of faith in some quarters. Unfortunately, the site can no longer be examined. The McMartin building has been leveled and replaced by another structure.

The Trap Doors:

The children talked about many trap-doors, and one hole in the floor. These led to rooms either directly or via tunnels. Various groups have committed a great deal of effort in searching for the tunnels. However, the search for the trap doors may well give us a better understanding of the McMartin puzzle. 11 of the children interviewed by the DA's investigators talked about the location of the access holes in the floor. A summary of their trap-door disclosures, sorted by entry location, is:

* These two disclosures were made by the same child and refer to what the child believes to be the same underground room.

Note that all of the trap doors, and other entry routes were described as being in different locations. No two children described the same spot. If there had been tunnel entrances at McMartin, one would expect that a child would have remembered where it was located.

The floor of the McMartin preschool building was a poured concrete pad. "...the District Attorney's investigators peeled back floor tiles and searched other locations to find trap doors at locations described by 11 children at the preschool site. There was no need to look under the foundation where openings or seals in the concrete were nonexistent." ₁₁ None of the access trap doors described by the children were ever found. It would have a straightforward job for the building owners to remove any trap doors, patch the concrete floor where the doors had been, and re-lay floor tiles. However, it is impossible to patch concrete without the edges being obvious to the eye.

Two examples of patched concrete are shown below. Both were taken in Kingston, ON, Canada near our office:

  This picture shows a concrete sidewalk at a local shopping mall. A post had been removed and the cavity in the concrete pad had been refilled with concrete. The edges of the original hole where the post was located are clearly visible. There is a difference in the color, the texture and the surface roughness between the patch and the original concrete.

  This picture was taken indoors in an corridor of a local industrial building. A portion of the concrete floor had been removed, some under-floor services had been installed, the excavation was backfilled and the concrete floor re-poured . The line between the original concrete floor and the new concrete can be easily seen. The carpenter's square tool in the pictures is 9.5" long. A wall and doorway can be seen in the right part of the picture.

Patches in concrete slabs are very obvious. They cannot be made invisible. You can check this out for yourself. If you know of any places where concrete has been patched, examine them and see if the patch is clearly visible.

The outside playhouse at McMartin was also described by some of the children as an access point to the underground tunnels. The building was mounted on a solid concrete slab. Police inspection of the concrete showed that "no trap door had ever been located there".

Searching for the tunnels

For additional details, refer to the article by John Earl. ₁

Conclusions:

Prior to the parents' excavation in 1985-MAR, none of the children disclosed memories of a secret room under the school building itself. All were in the vacant lot to the west of the preschool. Shortly after the parents' backhoe excavations turned up nothing, some children started to remember rooms under the school building. We suspect that the parents were disappointed that no tunnels were found where the children said they were. They probably sought other answers from the children, and easily persuaded them to reveal alternative, fictional locations underneath the building.

The "tunnels" and "room" that Dr. Stickel found were probably remnants of old trash dumps that were dug and filled many years before the Preschool building was constructed.

11 children described the locations of 13 entry doors. Yet the police were unable to find any trap doors or any remains of filled-in trap doors when they thoroughly inspected the building and playhouse. The obvious conclusion is that these are non-existent, fantasy trap-doors. The children simply made up stories in response to the interviewers' repeated direct questions. Recent studies in the US and New Zealand have indicated how easy it is to pressure very young children to fantasize if questions are not properly asked. Simply repeating a direct question is often enough to get an invalid answer. The child initially answers correctly, but soon recognizes that they are not giving the investigator the "right" answer. Thus, they make up another answer to satisfy the adult.

Other components of the children's testimony were clearly fantasy. For example, child molesters would hardly transport children to an abuse location by a hot air balloon, which is at the mercy of air currents. Even if by some miracle the balloon landed at the right location, the probability is extremely low that the winds would conveniently reverse direction exactly 180 degrees, in order to push the balloon back to the starting point. No child abuser with even a small amount of common sense would use a balloon to transport victims. We would assume that the trap-doors are like the balloons; they also exist only in fantasy.

We predict that investigators could select a few preschool hundred children in any locality in North America; interview them about their preschool experiences, using the same manipulative, suggestive methods as were used by the CII; and find dozens of children who would describe trap-doors, tunnels and underground rooms. Such a study could be designed without references to sexual abuse and thus could be conducted without any possibility of emotional harm to the children. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, such a study has never been conducted. If it were, the results would be very revealing.

The Real Tunnels:

Although no underground tunnels existed at McMartin, another type was present. The children referred to them as "tunnels". They were open-ended, brightly colored, plywood boxes about 16" wide, 24" tall and 24" deep. The children arranged them in various combinations on the floor like dominoes and crawled through them. These real tunnels were probably the root source of the belief in the mythical underground tunnels. ₈

English Tunnels:

A case of real child sexual abuse within a family occurred in Nottingham, UK. Many children from an extended family were placed in foster care. After the foster parents had been briefed about "signs" of ritual abuse, the parents and children started to report child abuse in many underground tunnels throughout the district. A very thorough police investigation was conducted of each location; they turned up no evidence of any tunnels in the present or past. It is obvious that the belief about tunnels under McMartin has been embraced by Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) promoters in England as it has in the US. Their belief was then transferred to the foster parents who in turn prompted the children for memories of tunnels. Eventually, the children responded with fantasies of tunnels. These fantasies have probably developed into false memories.

References

1. John Earl, "The Dark Truth About the 'Dark Tunnels of McMartin'", Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, Vol. 7, #2, 1995 Spring, P. Institute for Psychological Therapies, 13200 Cannon City Blvd., Northfield, MN 55057. An expose on the McMartin day care center underground tunnel myth. $15 USF; $20 USF (foreign). The article is available online at: http://www.ipt-forensics.com/  
2. Ellen Bass & Laura Davis, "The Courage to Heal, Third Edition, Harper Collins, New York NY, (1994). P. 520-1. Cites Dr. Stickel as finding tunnels.
3. Fukurai, et, "Sociologists in action: The McMartin sexual abuse case, litigation, justice, and mass hysteria..", Vol. 25, American Sociologist, 01-01-1994, P. 44. Contains an overview of the case and details of jury selection.
4. Paul & Shirley Eberle, "The Abuse of Innocence : The McMartin Preschool Trial", Prometheus Books (1993). ISBN: 0879758090. The book's authors attended the court sessions lasting over many years, and concluded that there was no case against the accused.
5. E.G. Stickel, "Archaeological Investigations of the McMartin Preschool Site, Manhattan Beach, California". Manhattan Tunnel Project (MTP), 1993. Introduction by R.C. Summitt. Paper is unpublished at this time.
6. R.C. Summitt, "The Dark Tunnels of McMartin", The Journal of Psycohistory, 21 (4); 1994-Spring, P. 5 - 13
7. Alex Constantine, "McMartin Preschool Revisited" at: http://www.mk.net/~mcf/alxmrtn2.htm reaches an entirely different conclusion about the tunnels.
8. Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, Vol. 7, #2, 1995-Spring. Cover photograph and Page 76.
9. "Archaeological investigations of the McMartin Preschool Site," Santa Cruz Ritual Abuse Task Force, at: http://members.cruzio.com/~ratf/McMartIntro.html  The report appears to interpret garbage dumps as filled-in tunnels. But it does not address the problem of how children were able to gain access to the "tunnels" through solid concrete floor without openings.
10. "The McMartin Preschool Tunnels," at: http://www.axiomatic.net/ragnar/mcmartin.htm
11. "Analysis of the report on the 186 (minus one page) Manhattan Tunnel Project (MTP) by E. Gary Stickel,"  at: http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume7/j7_2_1_26.htm 

Copyright © 1998, and 2000 to 2002 incl.,  by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Last update: 2002-FEB-9
Author: B.A. Robinson, based largely on an article by John Earl ₁