McMartin Pre-School of Past Returns for Jurors

In Hollywood anything is possible, and so it was that a Superior Court jury toured the McMartin Pre-School on Wednesday after a set-building company “reconstructed” it to approximate the way it looked in the late 1970s and early ‘80s when children were allegedly molested there.

Bused to Manhattan Beach along with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Pounders in a Sheriff’s Department van, jurors got their first and only look at the nursery school they have been hearing testimony about for nearly two years in the trial of Raymond Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey.

The visit lasted 70 minutes, as 12 jurors and two alternates wandered around the classrooms and playground in silence, sat at children’s tables to take notes, timed the walk from the front gate to defendant Raymond Buckey’s classroom, opened bathroom and closet doors, viewed toys and yard equipment. They also looked into the preschool grounds from the surrounding streets and from the balcony of an apartment building across Manhattan Beach Boulevard.

The judge ordered the jurors not to talk to one another as they toured the premises or to compare their impressions until they begin deliberations several months from now.

The group--which also included the bailiff, court clerk and attorneys and staff for both sides--were ignored by joggers and speeding traffic, but several passers-by, noting the plethora of cameras, stopped to see if a movie was being shot on location.

Indeed, the official “jury view” had many of the earmarks of a movie set. Even the actual mailman who testified a few months ago appeared as if on cue, making his regular rounds.

The defense sought the visit, and the prosecution initially objected, noting that defense attorney Danny Davis, who now owns the school as part of his legal fees, had repainted it a sparkling white and trimmed the surrounding greenery just before the trial began. The changes made were prejudicial, the judge agreed, because they made the premises appear far more light, open and accessible than they appeared in photographs taking during the six-year period during which the 65 criminal violations allegedly occurred. The elimination of much of the greenery, he said, was “a great and gross distortion of the way it existed as shown in these photographs.”

The small cluster of buildings had been vandalized, set afire and sprayed with graffiti since the case began more than five years ago, however, and Davis had spruced it up.

At Lawyer’s Expense

Undaunted, Davis offered to repaint the school its original pea green and to re-create the dense foliage and fencing surrounding it at his own expense--estimated at several thousand dollars.

“We’re on the West Coast,” he said during court arguments last fall. “Hollywood has something that can replace a tree, I would think, as long as we don’t get down to arguing that it’s not a real tree.”

Indeed, after defense staff members worked on the inside and Greensworld, a company that builds sets and supplies props for movies, wired fake branches into existing trees, brought in potted plants, and planted tall artificial weeds and bushes, it was almost impossible to tell what was real and what was fake.

Prosecutors then dropped their objections to the trip.

Pounders and attorneys visited the site late Monday and discussed such last-minute concerns Tuesday as the size of the elephant’s-ear plant and missing shelving. No detail was overlooked. “North of the hibiscus and south of the green fence,” said the judge, “I still don’t know what goes in there.” There was more work to be done, and Pounders made a final inspection Wednesday before he allowed the jury off the bus.

Defense attorney Dean Gits said he hoped that after viewing the school, the jury’s concept of its size would be “reduced by half. Their concept from the photographs, I think, is that is was much larger.”

The defense contends that the school was so small that the defendants could not have carried out the alleged acts of molestation undetected for such a long period of time.

‘From the Fantasy to the Reality’

“We have succeeded in bringing the jury from the fantasy to the reality of the school,” Davis said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lael Rubin, while expressing some reservations about the accuracy of the re-created setting, said she felt it important that the jury “see the school and (assess the degree of) access and visibility” from afar. While the jury inspected the school and its environs, nearly a score of reporters and photographers were held at bay across the street by Manhattan Beach Police Capt. Ray Burgess and several motorcycle officers.

Then reporters retraced the jury’s steps and added some of their own. One climbed atop the slide, another took to the swings, and a third climbed into a small fort to see whether approaching parents could have been spotted by a “lookout.” Several crammed into the bathroom of Raymond Buckey’s classroom--where, according to testimony, children put their clothes on after being molested--to see if it could accommodate more than one person. Others shouted to find out whether the sound would carry through the heating vent to the adjacent room.

Playing the role of parents, teachers and children, they tested what part of which classrooms could be seen from outside--particularly the corner room where children napped--and speculated about what one child might have meant when he testified there was a “secret room” in the school.