The most famous is the "mother of all SRA cases", the McMartin case. The McMartin preschool was a prestigious nursery school in Manhattan Beach, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. The owner, Virginia McMartin, and six teachers were arrested. Among them were Ray Buckey, a teacher and the owner's grandson and Peggy Buckey, his mother, who ran the school. Examples of accusations include that Ray Buckey killed a horse with his bare hands to frighten the children, the children were taken to a car wash and molested, a naked movie star game in which pornographic movies were made, and all sorts of sexual acts. Many children who did not attend when Ray Buckey was a teacher accused him of molesting them at the school. Others claimed that they were taken into tunnels beneath the school where the teachers had devil worshipping rituals. In spite of many excavations, no tunnels have been found.
After the 18 month pretrial hearings the prosecutor admitted that there was no evidence against five teachers and dropped charges against them. Of course by that time everything they owned had been consumed in attorneys fees and their reputations had been shattered. One teacher and her husband spent the next two years fighting to get their children back from foster care. As if that wasn't enough, the state billed them for the foster care at a rate of $100 per month. [See "Los Angeles Magazine", Oct. 1993]
The main trail of Peggy Buckey and her son Ray Buckey took two and a half years. The judge excluded many valuable defense witnesses but permitted extensive discussions by the prosecutor on Ray Buckey's belief in pyramid power, whether he ever had premarital sex with adult women, Ray's dislike for wearing underwear, and Ray's possession of Playboy. Peggy Buckey was acquitted on all charges. Ray was acquitted on most. The rest yielded hung jury verdicts with a majority voting for acquittal. In an unusual move, D. A. Ira Reiner retried to case on some of the remaining charges and achieved another hung jury. He then gave up. In the meantime Ray Buckey had spent several years in jail, and the state spent about $15 million dollars to investigate and try the case.
So far one book has been written about this case, "Abuse of Innocence" by Paul and Shirley Eberle (Prometheus Press, 1993). The book is highly critical of the state's handling of the case and the media coverage of it. It provides many first hand accounts of the trial and quotes from court records(the authors attended it). My problem with the book is it somewhat sensationalized and the authors seem to give credence to an anti establishment conspiracy theory that the government and the media are creating a massive nationwide witchhunt. Paul and Shirley Eberle are alleged to have been involved in the production of pornographic literature which included child pornography in the mid 1970's (SEE 88 Mich. L. Rev. 1709, n.27 (1990)).