Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  47. Although their true names are matters of public record, the first names of the McCuan girls have been changed here.

  48. Defense attorneys would later argue that Mary Ann Barbour’s repeated examinations of the girls’ genitals, rather than molestation, could have caused this condition. Source: Testimony and argument, “In re Scott and Brenda Kniffen, on Habeas Corpus,” Kern County Superior Court Case HC 5092.

  49. Although most of the research in this area has been done in the years since those interrogations, concerns had already been raised in law-enforcement circles in the late 1970s and early 1980s about the use of suggestive interviewing with children. Since then, a variety of studies have definitively shown that suggestive interviewing techniques can lead to false allegations by children, and most federal, state and local law-enforcement standards recommend open-ended questioning that allows children to use their own words rather than parrot adult comments. During her testimony in the Kniffen habeas hearing in Kern County Superior Court in July 1996, McGill University psychologist Maggie Bruck described her research on child suggestibility. In one of Bruck’s studies, a group of young children were asked leading questions about whether they had witnessed a school janitor’s abusive behavior. Though they had not witnessed any such behavior, more than half of the children claimed to have done so after being asked in a suggestive and leading manner. Bruck and other researchers have conducted many similar experiments and observed like results.

  50. Sources: Testimony of Murillo and Bruck and arguments of Michael Snedeker and Stan Simrin in the Kniffen and McCuan habeas hearing; Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan’s Silence, (New York: Basic Books, 1995) pages 56, 146; and Tamara Koehler, “Sex acts were described to children,” Bakersfield Californian, July 19, 1996.

  51. Police reports and medical records filed in the Kniffen habeas corpus action and described by Nathan and Snedeker in Satan’s Silence state that, prior to her hospitalization, an insomniac Mary Ann Barbour lost twenty pounds in the space of a month, was plagued by nightmares when she could sleep, and had hidden a gun in her car so she could be safe when “they” came to get her, “they” being representatives of some nameless conspiracy she believed was persecuting her. On January 15, 1980, after she threatened to stab her husband, Gene, and herself, Gene dialed 911. The sheriff’s deputy who responded to the call found Gene pinning Mary Ann to a kitchen counter. Shoeless and unkempt, her hair wild, she yelled at her husband, “I hate you. I’ll kill you! I hate you.” The deputy promptly took her to the county hospital’s psychiatric unit, where she was placed on a seventy-two-hour hold as a danger to herself and others. It was her second time as a mental-health patient, having been treated five years earlier for a suicide attempt and depression. The social worker assigned to her case at that time wrote, “Patient has much anger, a passive aggression that comes out in fear and distrust of others, a need to belittle others and Sgt.-like control of her children.” This time, she babbled endlessly about her granddaughter’s molestation and the fact that she believed Rod Phelps had killed people, displaying a condition that psychiatrists call “pressure of speech” (excessive, fast talking often associated with mania). She was diagnosed as delusional and obsessive, and was treated with the powerful antipsychotic drug Thorazine. Then she was transferred to another hospital, where different doctors did not consider her condition so serious. Six days later, she was sent home as an outpatient with only sleeping pills for medication.

  52. Mary Ann Barbour had turned for help to Jill Haddad, the child-abuse crusader and Ed Jagels’ campaign supporter. At the time, the vocal Haddad led a local chapter of an anti-molestation organization, S.L.A.M. (Stronger Legislation Against Molesters), which had been spawned by the murder of young Dana Butler and the failure to prosecute her suspected killer, Glenn Fitts, three years earlier. Haddad, who believed—correctly—that child molestation was woefully underreported and lackadasically prosecuted in that era, also believed in the existence of large-scale, secret conspiracies of molesters who communicated with one another, sharing information, photographs and even victims. Haddad also maintained a special relationship with the Kern County District Attorney that ensured her views would be taken seriously. She recommended that the social worker Carol Darling get the job as the DA’s child-abuse coordinator, making Darling a key figure in the Witch Hunt cases to come. Haddad, moreover, was the person who stood up during a pivotal campaign debate and publicly confronted Ed Jagels’ opponent in the DA’s race with confidential juvenile records (an event in which Darling also played a role in helping to retrieve those same records). Haddad was given access to all sex-crime arrest reports in Kern County, and the district attorney’s office began consulting with her on which cases to prosecute. This extraordinary arrangement with a civilian expanded further when the DA began using Haddad in the courtroom as an expert witness in molestation cases. Among other things, Haddad testified in favor of removing Jenny and Jane McCuan from their parents’ care and turning them over to Mary Ann Barbour. Sources: Nathan and Snedeker, Satan’s Silence, pages 57, 58; “Why adults molest the young,” Bakersfield Californian, April 10, 1982; Kern County Grand Jury, “A Special Interim Report,” July 5, 1983; Michael Tribey, “Adult’s Obsession Blamed in Children’s Charges,” Bakersfield Californian, April 13, 1986; and deposition of Mary Ann Boucher, McCuan vs. Kern, Kern County Superior Court case 181864, October 9, 1985.

  53. Sources: Kniffen habeas petition—Exhibit 22 (records from the Shalimar child protective home regarding Jenny and Jane McCuan), Exhibit 23 (notes of social worker Dana Maciewitz) and Exhibit 28 (April 26, 1982, report of Deputy Betty Shaneyfelt in Kern County Sheriff’s Department Case KC81-41195); and Nathan and Snedeker, Satan’s Silence, pages 58-59.

  54. One veteran social worker who worked with the McCuan and Kniffen children, Georgia Herald, recalled raising such questions. Herald had been concerned that every time the girls added a new suspect or allegation to their account, they were rewarded with praise, trips to the park, ice cream, and the like. In essence, the girls were given an incentive to make up increasingly sordid stories. No matter that their new stories contradicted their old ones, Herald said. The new stuff was hotter, bigger, capable of generating more indictments, more headlines, more juice come election time. “I don’t want to be alone with those girls,” Herald recalls telling Carol Darling, the child-sexual abuse coordinator for the district attorney’s office, Velda Murillo’s coworker and a former child-welfare colleague of Herald’s. “They accuse everyone around them sooner or later.”

  Darling had been handpicked by Jill Haddad to work in the district attorney’s office with the child victims of the molestation rings, interviewing them, supervising their care, forging a bond with them. She was an ardent Ed Jagels supporter during his first campaign for office, a member of the group that trooped to the courthouse one weekend and uncovered the embarrassing records that helped defeat his opponent. Darling’s curly blond hair and easy way with children almost, but not quite, masked the steely resolve of a prosecutorial zealot—a “true believer,” Herald called her, one who seemed to see a victim in almost every child she encountered. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, Georgia,” Herald recalls Darling replying. “Those girls would never accuse you of anything—as long as you don’t do anything to them.”

  Herald perceived an unspoken warning: Whatever the girls said, no matter how outlandish, would be believed, no matter who they accused. The only time they were disbelieved was when they asserted someone’s innocence. Then they would be questioned relentlessly until they accused once again. Herald eventually resigned because of this case, and, years later, her testimony would help free innocents from prison. Sources: Georgia Herald, interview with the author; Kniffen habeas petition, Exhibit 85 (the September 29, 1993, sworn declaration of Georgia Herald); testimony of Georgia Herald at the Kniffen-McCuan habeas hearing in July 1996.

  55. Only the third female prosecutor ever hired by the Kern County District Attorney (�
�You’re not some fuzzy-haired feminist, are you?” one of the attorneys conducting her job interview had asked), Grady was a proponent of a new, aggressive trend in prosecuting crimes against children. Instead of bundling all of the allegations into a single charge of molestation as was traditionally done, Grady took each separate sex act mentioned by the kids and charged it as a separate count—an approach that turned a misdemeanor case with an inevitable probation sentence into a major felony prosecution with a potential sentence of dozens of years in prison. This was a novel approach at the time, and though it is now standard, Grady was treading in uncertain waters, especially considering that she had little experience with major crimes to guide her and faced a great deal of head-shaking in her office. Source: Medalyian Grady, interview with the author.

  56. Although no verbatim record exists of Velda Murillo’s conversations with the girls, Medalyian Grady recalls tape-recording most of her conversations with Jenny and Jane. The tapes could have shown how much or how little pressure Grady put on the girls to continue their accusations of molestation—after those first interviews with Velda and sheriff’s detectives—and whether the later questioning was open-ended or leading. Grady says she applied no pressure herself. But the tapes that could have verified this have mysteriously vanished. Grady recalls turning them over to one of her successors on the case, but their whereabouts are now unknown. The district attorney never turned them over to defense attorneys, despite court orders requiring them to do so. Source: Medalyian Grady, interview with the author.

  57. Sources: the sworn affidavits and testimony of Brian and Brandon Kniffen in the July 1996 Kniffen habeas hearing; the testimony of Velda Murillo in that same hearing, regarding the suggestive nature of her interviews with children; and the April 13, 1982, tape-recorded sessions between the Kniffen boys and Kern County Sheriff’s Sergeant Don Fredenburg and Deputy DA Don McGillivray, introduced as evidence in the habeas hearing as Exhibits 79 and 80. The tactics used to overcome the boys’ denials of molestation, including separating the terrified children from one another, telling them that the authorities “knew” they had been molested and sold as sexual slaves, and telling each of them, falsely, that the other had admitted to being molested. Your brother is telling us all about being molested, the inquisitors would say. Won’t you tell us, too? The boys also recall being told they could go home to their parents if only they would tell police the allegations were true—which was, of course, false.

  58. Medalyian Grady, interview with the author.

  59. This sort of unflagging faith in the credibility of the children was not limited to prosecutors. It was also adopted by the Kern County judge who ruled there was sufficient evidence to bring the McCuans and Kniffens to trial—Municipal Court Judge Alan Klein, who would later preside unremarkably over pretrial matters in the Dunn case, then become embroiled in scandal for consorting with a stripper on trial in his court. In People vs. Kniffen, et al. West Kern Municipal Court Cases 33610, 33614 and 33624, Klein made the odd finding that Jenny’s recantation of accusations against her uncle and other inconsistencies in the children’s testimony made them more, rather than less, credible. Judge Klein also concluded that the similarities in the four children’s stories, and the fact that they had so many seemingly sophisticated sexual details in common, proved they were telling the truth. Kids don’t fantasize such things, the judge ruled—unaware, as was Grady before him, that in dozens of interviews, social workers, detectives and DA staffers had supplied every imaginable sexual detail to the kids, requiring them only to say, “Yes, that’s what Mommy and Daddy did to me.” Sources: Transcript of August 10, 1992, conclusion of the preliminary hearing in People vs. Kniffen, et al; and Kathy Freeman, “Testimony isn’t child’s play,” Bakersfield Californian, December 5, 1982.

  60. Nothing seemed to sway the authorities in their steadfast belief that the children had been molested. They were not interested in the parents’ denials, and barely bothered to question them when they failed to confess. Later, the authorities showed no interest in the fact that the Kniffens passed lie-detector tests administered by ex-law-enforcement officials, nor would the DA agree to have law-enforcement experts from the California Department of Justice administer additional polygraph examinations, ones that could not be dismissed as bought and paid for by the defense.

  61. Scott Kniffen’s father, Dick, who was well known in the community and a partner in one of Bakersfield’s largest accounting firms, mortgaged his and his wife’s house to pay for private investigators and to have an engineer rip out the ceiling in his son’s house, revealing virgin plaster and beams, with no signs of hooks, holes or repairs. The authorities’ response was to claim publicly—without any evidence—that the elder Kniffens were in on the plot as well. Dick Kniffen was accused (but never charged) of destroying evidence of child pornography, and Marilyn was alleged to have pressured the boys into recanting, though she, too, was never formally charged. (Both passed privately administered polygraph tests refuting these allegations.) Once the elder Kniffens sided with Scott and Brenda, prosecutors and child-protection workers—in an unprecedented joining of forces—did everything they could to limit contact between the Kniffen children and their grandparents, even if it meant violating a judge’s orders allowing them visitations. Later, the boys’ aunt, Pamela Kniffen, tried to gain temporary custody. A real estate appraiser in Montana, she and her husband had adopted several troubled children there, after a thorough investigation by Montana officials deemed their home safe, wholesome and loving. Kern County authorities, however, vehemently opposed allowing the boys to live there, and accused Pamela of child molestation even though no such evidence existed. Sources: Author’s interviews with private investigator Denver Dunn (no relation to Pat Dunn), attorney Michael Snedeker and Pamela Kniffen; a 181-page analysis of the Kniffen-McCuan prosecution and related cases completed in January 1995 by private investigator Denver Dunn; Michael Trihey, “Molestation inquiry tactics questioned,” Bakersfield Californian, April 13, 1986; and Trihey, “Detective uses mannequins to re-enact crimes,” Bakersfield Californian, April 15, 1985.

  62. Kern County authorities were so confident in Woodling that his results would be used to prosecute many subsequent cases, including some in which the child victims denied being molested even after many interrogations. According to an affidavit filed in the Kniffen and McCuan habeas corpus action, one eleven-year-old girl, now grown, recalls Woodling announcing he knew she had been molested, despite her pleas that nothing had happened. “This test will show who’s right and who’s wrong,” she swore he told her. Then he examined the girl, using his wink test as well as placing various glass tubes inside her rectum and vagina—an experience she later likened to being “violated against my will.” In an interview with the author, Dr. Woodling, who now runs a children’s program in the Palm Springs, California, area and who still testifies in abuse cases there, said he could no longer recall the specifics of this case. However, he said he would never have made such statements to a child nor would he have examined any child against his or her will. Sources: In Re Scott and Brenda Kniffen, Exhibits 84A (interview of Tricia McCuan) and 84B (declaration of Tricia McCuan); and author’s interview with Bruce Woodling.

  63. Woodling, in an interview with the author, conceded that there had been no scientific studies performed to validate his opinions about the Wink Test, which he said were based solely on his own experience examining abused children. Woodling said he had made this distinction clear in his testimony, though the defense argued strenuously that jurors were led to believe Woodling’s tests provided decisive proof of molestation. The scientific studies have since been performed, however, and they decisively show that Woodling’s wink test is useless in proving or disproving molestation. Woodling says he no longer uses the wink test in evaluating suspected abuse in children. Woodling’s work was the subject of extensive testing and argument in the 1996 Kniffen habeas hearings.

  64. These conflicts arose continually as the
number of molestation-ring cases grew. In one subsequent case, a single deputy DA simultaneously prosecuted parents accused of being part of the Nokes molestation ring, fought in juvenile court to keep the children away from their other relatives, and expressed a personal interest in adopting one of the victims—a profound conflict of interest and ethical lapse no one at the time even questioned.

  “When it came to deciding what was best for children, there was God, and then there was the Kern County District Attorney,” the social worker Georgia Herald would later recall in an interview with the author. “Not necessarily in that order.”

  65. Gindes won the conviction of a man named Robert Valdez for murdering another man outside a wedding reception. Having secured a lengthy prison sentence against Valdez, Gindes fought hard to minimize and undermine new evidence and discredit witnesses who surfaced after the trial to suggest he had prosecuted the wrong man. Gindes was adamant that the new witnesses must be lying, and a law clerk under his supervision was dispatched to impersonate a news reporter in order to interview one witness who did not want to talk to the DA—a move which was roundly criticized. Valdez’s conviction was later overturned on appeal because of new evidence. A new trial, with the new witnesses, led to his acquittal. He had spent three years behind bars. Sources: Jim Foley, “Posing as a reporter stirs DA criticism,” Fresno Bee, May 9, 1978; Miles Shuper, “Robert Valdez looks around—after three years behind bars,” Visalia Times-Delta, May 30, 1979.

  66. Gindes has consistently denied ever pressuring the Kniffens or any other child victims, and says his only concern when prosecuting alleged molesters was protecting children and seeing justice done. If there was any coercion in the Kniffen-McCuan case, he never witnessed it, Gindes has said. He stated that he does not believe any such coercion occurred, but he cannot completely rule it out either, because he came to the Kniffen case many months after charges were originally filed, and after the many initial interviews—later said to have been suggestive and coercive—had already been performed. Source: Andrew Gindes, interview with the author; and Gindes, interview on ABC’s Turning Point, November 14, 1996.