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Season Five Home for the Holidays 13
154 Plays9 days ago
In Today’s Episode, we put together our Home for the Holiday cases.
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Sources:
www.namus.gov
www.thecharleyproject.com
www.newspapers.com
Findlaw.com
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
https://zencastr.com/?via=truecrimexs
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Transcript
Introduction and Media Portrayal of Court Cases
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:22
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:00:28
Speaker
I get sucked into how court cases are portrayed in the media these days. I watch a lot of live trials. Like this fall, I'd watched ah multiple trials, different states, and and I found that interesting how different places handle things.
00:00:45
Speaker
You know, one of my criteria for current cases, we don't really talk, I mean, we give like some news tidbits here and there, but like one of my criteria is like, I gotta know from the mouths of the people involved in, under oath, right? Yeah. What is occurring? And, you know, a lot of the cases we cover, that's not possible at this point in time.
Transparency and Discrepancies in Court Documents
00:01:09
Speaker
It hasn't always been as transparent,
00:01:11
Speaker
but it is really different. Some places are wide open. Some places are you can't find anything about any court situation. In other places, they have it wide open, but everything's on the side.
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, and my thing has always been default to the court documents themselves. And if I can see people saying things or hear them saying things that are in line with what's in the court documents, that's helpful.
Collective Hysteria and Moral Panic
00:01:39
Speaker
But really, in my opinion, that's sort of the starting point for cases. Like that's not, it is the be all end all in terms of how the courts are considering things. But that's really how you can see If you're able to sit down and read particularly an appellant document or like a first trial document versus a second trial document, you can read very easily like where something kind of goes wrong. um And we do have the benefit of hindsight and being able to look at what the outcome of some things are. ah One of the things that's always fascinated me
00:02:20
Speaker
related to to court cases like that. And ah I guess the the passage of time, to steal a phrase from you, is like collective hysteria.
Daycare Sex Abuse Hysteria and Media Sensationalism
00:02:34
Speaker
And that's true with any type of like moral panic. um I think a lot about like the satanic panic cases where in the United States in the 80s into the early 90s, there were something like 15,000 cases of unsubstantiated cases of, quote, satanic ritual abuse. And when I find a real one, they're rare. um They're so rare. I always like compare what I found in that real one to like what the fake ones were. Another thing that happened in terms of like moral panic during the 80s and 90s,
00:03:13
Speaker
were these cases where they've now classified them as daycare sex abuse hysteria. Do you remember when that this sort of trend in legal proceedings was happening? I remember seeing it in the media, yes. So I pulled a case today that sort of went along with the daycare sex abuse panic, not very catchy. And I'll be honest about these cases. They're difficult to research in terms of some of them were so sensationalized by the media that after it all settled down 20 years later, and now with the internet capturing literally everything, these cases have been stifled quite a bit.
Workforce Changes and Public Fear of Daycare Facilities
00:04:07
Speaker
What happens in these cases is when you have collective charges against people that are publicized by the media as being daycare sexual abuse and you know, it's run on the nightly news all of the news magazines on the weekends would pick them up and It wasn't just in the United States, but the United States was a little out of control. There were definitely there are cases that I've read about in various European countries. I've read about a couple of Canadian cases. I've read about a couple of Australian cases, a New Zealand case or two. I've read about some South Americans, specifically Brazil, some cases, where a couple of things contributed to this happening.
00:04:48
Speaker
Now, if you go read about this in terms of like what was going on, and you'll find that during the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was this trend among women returning to the workforce outside of the home. When women go back to the the workforce, they create a gap in time where I was what was considered a latchkey kid,
00:05:15
Speaker
And I had younger siblings, but I would come home and literally have a key to my home. I would go in and my family had developed a routine where everybody came in and did snacks and there was time for television and time for homework. And then our parents would come in and there were certain things we were supposed to have done like along the way as part of that routine. Now, whether we did that or not is kind of depending on the day.
00:05:42
Speaker
Right, but I don't really think that's a thing now. Not as much. But so because you had these type of situations going on, and I'm slightly after this ah daycare sex abuse hysteria timeframe, I'm like when I'm doing that, it's really kind of late 80s into the early 90s.
00:06:01
Speaker
But when women started returning to the workforce in 1970s and 1980s, it resulted in a large number of different types of daycare facilities being opened. You would have some that were opened related to a school. You would have some opened in religious facilities. You would have some people who opened their homes. You would have standalone facilities. You would even have franchise facilities. Now,
00:06:27
Speaker
One of the beliefs of how this hysteria came to be was that the populace at large was not used to women being in a situation where they were leaving the children with strangers.
Children's Suggestibility and False Testimonies
00:06:42
Speaker
And that there could have been, along with programs like DARE and Stranger Danger, that some of the anxiety and guilt that women felt leaving young children with these people they didn't know,
00:06:56
Speaker
may have created a climate of fear and that may have contributed to a sort of gullibility where they were easily able to and ready to believe accusations that were prompted by children or other parents or or whomever may have brought this up. Because you would think that something has to be behind it. This isn't just a frivolous situation that somebody you know makes out of whole cloth. The biggest thing was for me looking at it, how widespread it like, it because it was like rampant, right? Yeah. It started and then it just was like out of control. And then the most interesting thing, the series of cases we're going to talk about today, it wasn't actually the series of cases that I was familiar with. And I'm so surprised that there's another series of cases in the same area at the same time.
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah, this ramps up around 1980 in the US, where this I guess the the media reporting on these cases and the fact that you have all these children who are in daycare facilities around the country, it becomes sort of this social science experiment that nobody is aware of the fact that it's going on and they're all sort of participating.
00:08:14
Speaker
no and Yeah, it's in retrospect that it becomes a thing. Yeah, yeah so in hindsight, we we know that anxiety among young mothers and and by proxy their entire family may have contributed to this. There's also the concept of suggestibility of children.
00:08:31
Speaker
Children in general have been known to be in many instances susceptible to or vulnerable to many outside influences, including the influence of authority, the influence of collectivity, where they all are able to you know show some camaraderie by going along with what their peer groups are doing.
00:08:53
Speaker
Those vulnerabilities to outside influences could result in storytelling and the fabrication of facts. children's testimony is able to be influenced in many, many ways. And we know this now because of this time and age. So we had different experts looking at it as it was all happening and coming into the courtroom to, as all of this unfolded, to analyze the testimony of children, not just in daycare abuse cases. This also spills over to satanic panic. There was also a trend of juvenile crime that this spills into
00:09:32
Speaker
You can read about this in a book called Jeopardy in the Courtroom. which is ah The subtitle is A Scientific Analysis of Children's Testimony. and This is written by Maggie Brock. She was a professor within the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at John Hopkins School of Medicine.
00:09:51
Speaker
And she wrote that children incorporate aspects of the questions they're being asked into their answers and how they tell their stories in an attempt to tell the interviewer what they believe the interviewer wants to hear. This is also seen in adults even in cases of false confessions. But studies show that when adults ask children questions that don't make sense, such as, is milk bigger than water?
00:10:22
Speaker
Could red, the color red, be heavier than the color yellow? Children will offer an answer up believing that there is an answer to be given because they don't have the capacity to understand that the question is framed and articulated and absurd.
00:10:43
Speaker
Now, if you ask children the same questions over and over again, they will change their answers believing that they have disappointed you and not been able to give you the, quote, correct answer, even though some instances there is no correct answer. It's an open-ended question. where adults who don't know how to interview children are attempting to put facts together. But children are very susceptible to suggestive questions, to leading questions, and research has found that it is not uncommon for children in general to make up fictitious scenarios, and some of those fictitious scenarios have been found to include
00:11:29
Speaker
sexual abuse and physical abuse that did not occur. During this whole thing though, and maybe it is just because we get to look back on it, but the seriousness of the allegations and the crimes that we're ultimately talking about, if they were to have occurred, they're so just taboo and blatantly bad and it's something that needs to be dealt with, but it's also something that I feel like just the sheer number should have been a flag. Yeah, it should ah it should have been a flag. One of the things that popped up here that's interesting is is children, we've learned now that certain children frequently under report abuse, meaning abuse is happening, but they don't know who to talk to about it, and they don't know what to say about it. In fact, right, it's almost like the polar opposite, right? Yeah, and so one of the things that would happen is depending on which situation you're addressing at which time and who are the interviewers,
00:12:31
Speaker
You would get a mix of kids, so some kids would start the story, and they're asked these open-ended questions, and they provide a glimmer of something that could be possibly interpreted under certain circumstances as abuse. Some kids wouldn't want to talk about it, and some kids, due to peer pressure, would tell similar stories to stories that other children had told, and after interviewing, they shared what had happened with their peers.
00:12:58
Speaker
so you would find a wide variety of scenarios that sort of that should have suggested that what was really happening was children were not understanding how to respond to what would today be in a forensic interview, but back then was more interview, less forensic, because we did not know psychologically how to handle interviewing large amounts of children to discern facts.
The McMartin Preschool Case and Sensational Allegations
00:13:28
Speaker
and for whatever reason didn't realize that the fact that large numbers of children needed to be interviewed starts to preclude what the whole thing is. Yeah, and so the first case that really hits the media has like some interesting examples in there it's not the case we're talking about today because there's a case that sort of precedes this. But the first case that hits the media was known as the McMartin Preschool Case. Which is exactly what I thought this case was. I'm familiar with the McMartin case and everything that occurred is terrible and I couldn't fathom a world where, like, this isn't that.
00:14:07
Speaker
Right, so this case, if you were to nutshell this case, it would be considered the first major daycare abuse case put up for litigation and to receive major media attention. The bottom line is, if you go and read about the McMartin preschool trial,
00:14:25
Speaker
Seven teachers are accused of kidnapping children, flying them around the world in an airplane, and forcing them to engage in various types of group sex, as well as forcing them to watch animals being tortured and killed.
00:14:40
Speaker
The case involved accusations that children had been forced to participate in bizarre and heretofore unknown religious rituals, that they were being used to feed into this huge child but sexual abuse material ring. It began with a single accusation made by a mother of one of the students It grew rapidly when investigators informed parents of the accusation and began trying to interview the other students. so It later comes out that that mother had very, very serious mental health issues and had a diagnosis of a catastrophic mental health issue. But the case made headlines in the United States in 1984. And it ruined a lot of people's lives. It ruined the lives of at least seven teachers and I think there's about 12 outliers, but the seven teachers were arrested and charged that year. It took until 1986 when a new district attorney took over the case, reexamined the evidence and looked at it all and said, ah we don't know what's happening here. that's Exactly what makes sense, right?
00:15:49
Speaker
Yes, yeah yeah. They do keep some of the charges though. The trials became one of the longest and most expensive criminal trials in the history of the United States. And by 1990, roughly six years later, everything had been dismissed. The trial was Bizarre ah it's it's known for at this point the disapproval that it was met with by the jurors and all the academic researchers who are watching it ah there was a lot of criticism of the interviewing techniques that investigators had used when they went to this school and and how they interviewed these children, how they coax these children into these bizarre accusations, repetition at which they asked the children ah the same questions and slightly different questions and the incentives that they had offered for the children to report the abuse. At this point in time,
00:16:42
Speaker
It is considered that pretty much all the information that was elicited from these children was completely false, but that this case and the publicity of this case led to many of the other cases you might hear about.
Kern County Cases and Wrongful Convictions
00:17:00
Speaker
This case took place in California. The following year, there were cases at a Country Walk Babysitting Service in Miami, Florida. There were the Fells Acres Day School case, which was up in Massachusetts. um Actually, I think it was taking place around the same time, but it's very similar setup. There were multiple other New York and Massachusetts cases that came out. There was a huge New Jersey case that came out, a Florida case. There were scandal that came out.
00:17:27
Speaker
sort of the end of all of this in North Carolina. There was a scandal in Texas that took many, many years to get to the bottom of it. That was the Oak Hill Satanic ritual sex abuse trial, which was bizarre. There was the Faith Chapel Church ritual and sexual abuse trial. You can find a lot of starting information on on the internet about this. I would have to say, though, that I'm going to go ahead and put it on the line that when you're talking about seven teachers or whatever, you know, groups of adults directly abusing sexually abusing small children, that is
00:18:12
Speaker
I would go so far to say never except not. It is almost never going to happen in where you've got seven teachers who are all abusing kids. Yeah. And it undermines everything, right? Yeah. Because of the depravity of an actual sexual predators that are operating at levels that like these cases purport to have them operating at. None of it is logical.
00:18:40
Speaker
to me at all. I do realize there that well-meaning officials can want to get justice for small children who can't stand up for themselves, but it got really out of hand. Yeah, most of this, if you go back and trace most of what we're going to talk about today, You will find that one guy is at the center of all of it. He was the longest ah sitting district attorney of Kern County, California. His name is Ed Yegels, ah J-A-G-E-L-S. I don't know if it's Jegels or Yegels. He held the office of district attorney in Kern County from 1983 to 2010.
00:19:17
Speaker
And during that time, he was responsible for prosecuting some of the most notorious cases of wrongful convictions. And he engaged in what is now acknowledged to be the most widespread pattern of prosecutorial misconduct in probably the history of the United States legal system. His convictions and the path that they took resulted in dozens and dozens of millions of dollars in settlements. Wake that he left behind him was absolutely awful. He took no responsibility for it. He really had no business being a prosecutor. He had started with the Kern County District Attorney's Office in 1975 as a deputy district attorney. ah
00:20:01
Speaker
as a deputy district attorney in the misdemeanor unit, and then he worked as a floater. He would cover different courts that didn't have enough prosecutors to cover what was going on. It didn't take very long for him to work his way up. He got a coveted position on the Narcotics Task Force, which was a joint task force between city and county law enforcement officers that was designed to stop the flow of narcotics in Kern County. He became like more than ah an advisor on that task force, and it was the first sign that that he was trouble. He would personally try cases that he had been a part of investigating. Now, that carries over to him being elected District Attorney of Kern County. He sort of gave him the clout that he needed to be a part of that. He gets elected in 1983, and soon after his election, he created a task force to investigate
00:20:52
Speaker
sexual abuse against children. And between 1983 and 1987, he brought tons and tons and tons of quote, pedophile groups to trial in his court and many convictions came out of it.
False Allegations and Wrongful Convictions
00:21:07
Speaker
Today, many conspiracy theories come from the playbook that Ed used to put all of the information about the case we're about to talk about into the media.
00:21:19
Speaker
because it's it's largely ridiculous. It is completely ridiculous. I don't want to be caught up in the idea that I'm saying the abuse of children by authority figures is ridiculous. No, that's not ridiculous. But what is ridiculous is when you have something so abstract being presented as such abuse, that it skews the narrative for decades to come.
00:21:46
Speaker
on what a pedophile actually is, right? It does. And victims who have actually experienced it, not just been talked into it by an investigator, you know, to substantiate a task force that's been created. And not, I mean, I can't even get into all the havoc that wreaks, but actual victims of this type of predatory ah sexual abuse, they don't get justice because of this garbage. Right. So in 1982, Alvin and Debbie McCune, they have two daughters and they're coached by their step-grandmother, Mary Ann Barber, who has legal custody and of them at the time into talking about having been abused by their parents.
00:22:41
Speaker
Between the three of them, the two daughters and step-grandmother, they began to accuse them, ah meaning Alvin and Debbie, of being part of a sex ring that included a lot of local people. The first in the ring was Scott and Brenda Niffen. Now, the Niffen's two sons claimed that they had been abused.
00:23:05
Speaker
For these two cases, these four children, two daughters, two sons, no physical evidence was ever found of any type of abuse. So the McKeowns and the Niffins are convicted in 1984. Between the four, they receive a prison sentence of more than a thousand years. Now, they're gonna stay in prison for a while.
00:23:31
Speaker
And Just Ask My Children is a movie that is made about this case that is going to be broadcast in or in the early existence of lifetime. There are six similar cases that occur throughout Kern County. The testimony of five young boys becomes the prosecution's evidence in a trial in which four defendants are convicted. And I thought we would talk about them today.
00:23:59
Speaker
So the first person that we're going to talk about is a guy named John Stoll. Do you remember ever hearing about him because he's sort of forgotten in all of this? I've never heard of him outside of researching to talk about it here now. Okay. So he's got a profile on the registry of ah National Registry of Exonerations at the University of Michigan Law School.
00:24:24
Speaker
And we're going to use his profile as like the basis for the next few minutes that we talk about this. Now this is Kern County, California to child sex abuse case is the most serious crime. The reported date for John Stoll is 1984. He is convicted in 1985 and he will not be exonerated until 2004.
00:24:47
Speaker
He is a white male. He was 41 years old in 1984. The contributing factors to his wrongful conviction or perjury or false accusations and official misconduct. And there is no DNA evidence contributing to this exoneration.
00:25:07
Speaker
Here's how they put John's case together for us on this exoneration page. From 1984 through 1986, at least 30 defendants were convicted of child sex abuse and related charges. They were sentenced to long prison terms in a series of interrelated cases in Kern County, California. There were an additional eight defendants who accepted plea bargains that would keep them out of prison.
00:25:37
Speaker
Over time, 20 of these defendants who were sentenced to prison ended up being exonerated. The earliest one was in 1991. The latest one at the time of all of this is 2008. In most of these exonerations, the children who had testified that they had been abused recanted their testimony.
00:26:02
Speaker
In all of the exonerations, there was evidence that the complaining witnesses, some as young as four years old, had either been coerced or persuaded by the authorities to make false accusations. The Kern County cases are the oldest and largest known of several groups of prosecutions that occurred in a wave of child sex abuse hysteria that had swept the country in the 1980s and early 1990s.
00:26:30
Speaker
Some, but not all of these cases, included allegations of satanic rituals. Many of them were focused on daycare centers. Nationally, there have been dozens of exonerations in child sex abuse hysteria cases. On June 10, 1984, John Stoll fell under suspicion when his ex-wife, Ann Carlin, called the Kern County Sheriff's Department and said she believed that on a recent visit with Stoll, their six-year-old son had been molested by a man named Grant Self who rented John Stoll's pool house. Stoll and Carlin had recently gone through a bitter divorce and Carlin was angry that a judge had granted joint custody over this six-year-old child.
00:27:22
Speaker
When Kern County officials questioned Carlin, they asked whether she suspected stolen abusing their son. At first, she told them she never considered that he would do that. But she later hinted that maybe it was possible. At this time, hysteria over child sex abuse had become widespread throughout Kern County.
00:27:46
Speaker
Based on Carlin's statements, police launched the full-fledged investigation to determine whether the child had been sexually involved with John Stoll and other adults and whether there might be other victims, despite the fact that there was no testimony or physical evidence to suggest that this was happening. Kern County officials interviewed the six-year-old as well as five of his friends who were known to come over to John Stoll's house to play.
00:28:16
Speaker
All of the boys who were between six and eight years old at the time this was occurring. When interviewed by investigators, John Stoll's six-year-old son said that he had been forced to perform sexual acts by a woman named Margie Grafton.
00:28:33
Speaker
Grafton's live-in boyfriend, Tim Paloma, and a man named Grant Self. This is the man that was living in the pool house. The boy was initially reluctant to talk about his father, but eventually he also accused John Stoll of sexually abusing him. Using highly suggestive interview techniques, investigators also elicited allegations of abuse from other boys.
00:28:56
Speaker
One friend of John Stoll's son said that he had been molested by Stoll because he was afraid that if he didn't, the authorities would deport his mother, who happened to be an undocumented Mexican immigrant.
00:29:08
Speaker
The other boys initially denied that they had been sexually assaulted by anyone, but after being questioned repeatedly and at length and being promised that if they admitted they'd been abused, everything would be all right and they'd be able to go home, they gave statements saying that they too had been sexually abused by Stoll, Grafton, Palomo, and Self. There are major inconsistencies among these children's statements.
00:29:36
Speaker
And I will restate that these statements do not match even a little bit. Nonetheless, in June of 1984, all four defendants were charged with child sexual abuse. Can you imagine that?
00:29:53
Speaker
You're just standing there thinking. Yeah, right? Cause that's how I see it. Like it comes out of like absolutely nowhere. You've got the ex-wife who like, she's like, Oh no. Cause she got pressured too, right? yeahp And it explodes. And it's like a train wreck that you started. You cannot stop and you have to watch.
00:30:14
Speaker
Well, by the time you like say the first thing, and that's gonna be with Carlin, with Anne Carlin, by the time she says the first thing, like she kind of belongs to the cops at that point in a situation like this. I say that because like they were out actively looking for a pedophile ring.
00:30:33
Speaker
that didn't exist, but now they've made it exist. They've willed this pedophile ring into existence. So her suggesting that John Stoll could be a part of all this means that she becomes the impetus for them being able to make these interviews happen, do all the search warrants. Like she is literally the basis for everything that occurs in this particular instance. When she says, I think someone living in my husband's pool house tried to molest my six year old son. Right, and so getting the stories out of those kids did so much damage to them. Well, not only that, but like, okay, the way this goes down, how would you even know
00:31:19
Speaker
Once it's been wrapped up into the sex abuse ring, what if there had been an actual ah abuse going on of one adult on one child? It's now lost.
00:31:30
Speaker
It's completely lost, but see, that's where you know that it it is. Now, I'm not saying that somewhere in the fold, it couldn't exist. But what I'm saying is, it's sort of like the three suspect thing, except like, you know, they have to make it make sense or make the confusion, like, okay, right? Yeah. Like the more people you involved, the more like the kids' stories don't match. It makes sense. Like they were just really confused. Except like at the end, it's just fiction, right? And if there happens to be a child...
00:32:05
Speaker
in the mix of the situation who really was abused. Again, my point being, they're not getting justice for that. In fact, it's coming across as a complete farce to them, I would imagine. Or they think everybody is abused like they are. It would still be confusing, like, why are all these other people involved? Because that's never how sexual abuse happens. Think about it.
00:32:32
Speaker
I promise you this story has a shocking ending, otherwise it wouldn't be bringing all of this up. And the shocking ending has a shocking ending. This is going to trial. We have four defendants. We have John Stoll, Grant Self. We have Margie Grafton and her boyfriend, Tim Paloma. So those four defendants are going to trial. Prior to trial, their attorneys request that medical examinations be performed on all of these children.
00:33:00
Speaker
Which is what should have happened to begin with. Well, the prosecution argues against it and says that this would be an unnecessary violation of the children's privacy. And guess what? The judge agrees. Yeah, the judge agrees. Well, I got news for you. A physical examination at the onset of this would have been better than what they subjected them to. Yeah. So the defense also tries to bring in the testimony of a psychologist who's named Dr. Roger Mitchell.
00:33:30
Speaker
He had conducted psychological examinations of Margie Grafton and Templeoma, and he was prepared to say that they did not fit the profile of sexual predators, but the judge refuses to allow his testimony. September 24th, 1984 rolls around, and the defendant's joint trial begins. Six boys come in and testify against John Stoll.
00:33:58
Speaker
They claim that he and the co-defendants had sexually abused them. Much of their testimony contradicts each other, and there is no other evidence to support their claims except for their testimony. Nevertheless, based on these children's testimony, a jury convicts all four defendants of a total of 36 counts of child molestation.
00:34:20
Speaker
Right, because a jury is probably never going to listen to the testimony of a child regardless of whether or not it was coerced, rehearsed, prompted, whatever, and not act. Correct. John Stoll, he gets convicted on 17 counts, and he has sentenced to 40 years in prison. Shortly after this trial is over and the sentencing has occurred,
00:34:44
Speaker
at least two of these children take back and recant their testimony. The Supreme Court of California gets a hold of but Margie Grafton and Tim Paloma's cases, and on December 18th, 1989, they reversed their convictions and they conclude that
Exonerations and the Role of Innocence Projects
00:35:01
Speaker
Dr. Mitchell, who was prepared to testify about what sexual predators' profiles typically are, should have been allowed to testify at trial, and the judge excluding his testimony was improper. And they felt like, given the inconsistency in the children's testimony and the lack of any physical evidence, that Dr. Mitchell testifying would have easily affected how the jury saw this case.
00:35:28
Speaker
and would have allowed them to have sort of an additional perspective on this. Now, Margie Grafton and Templeoma, they get released after this, and the charges end up being dismissed in 1990. However,
00:35:44
Speaker
Stole remains incarcerated. Do you have any idea what the relationship was? but Between the people here? Yes. So Tim Paloma was Margie Grafton's boyfriend and they were friends with John Stole. Well, because my initial thought was that the kid named Margie because he remembered her name. Probably. The name probably stood out.
00:36:08
Speaker
Right, exactly. And so, like, my thought is it would be really unfortunate to have been that person, right? Because it could have been anybody, right? He literally could have named anybody he had come into contact with.
00:36:19
Speaker
Yeah. So it's the son's first interviews that lead to Tim and Margie. And you're probably right. That probably was, did your dad bring any friends over? Yes. Right. Exactly. Do you know their names? Yes. Can you name one for me? I don't know. We just need one name. Like, is there anyone you can remember their name and they get to Margie that way? I'm guessing.
00:36:39
Speaker
that's how That's what I imagined and that's why I asked because I let mean, they don't really get into the details there, but I imagined that he named someone he remembered. Yeah. And this case has a lot of instances like that. What's interesting is when the police go to ask other children, they give different names that don't match up with any of this.
00:37:02
Speaker
That's how we land with only having these four defendants, which I guess is kind of a godsend. John Stoll is not affected by Dr. Mitchell's testimony. but It was not brought up at his trial. But his attorney is eventually able to persuade the Northern California Innocence Project to take a look at his case. So the investigators then tracked down the witnesses who are now, they were children, but they're now all adults. They're no longer You know, there were six to eight when the accusations happened. By the time it goes to trial, they're a little bit older. But by the time the Innocence Project gets involved, you're talking about it's the turn of the century. So they're all adults now. And in interviews, four of them completely recant their testimony. And a fifth says they can't remember any of it ever happening. The only one who stands by its original testimony is John Stoll's son.
00:37:57
Speaker
On December 26, 2002, John stole his attorney's file, a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to get him back in front of Kern County Superior Court.
00:38:12
Speaker
arguing that his conviction was based on false testimony. This petition also alleges that Kern County CPS workers and police at the time used coercive and manipulative interviewing techniques that resulted in unreliable testimony of the child witnesses. At an evidentiary hearing, all of these child witnesses come back in and they testify. Four of them recant One reports that they have no memory of being abused, except for John Stoll's son. He says that he was abused by his father and that his testimony was truthful.
00:38:56
Speaker
Stoll's attorneys argue that this all goes back to the original situation, and that more likely than not, Anne Carlin, this boy's mother, had influenced this testimony. Well, right, because that is how it started.
00:39:13
Speaker
Correct. The court takes all this into consideration and the Superior Court on April 30th of 2004, they vacate John Stoll's convictions. They find that the techniques that investigators use to question the children resulted in unreliable testimony. Four days later on his 61st birthday, John Stoll is released from prison and the prosecution dismisses all of his charges. He had served 20 years in prison which is the longest sentence of any of the wrongfully convicted child sex abuse defendants who are exonerated out of Kern County. The California Attorney General and the State Board of Control had investigated this case. And on May 18, 2006, so two years later, they announced their determination that John Stoll had not committed any of the crimes of which he was convicted.
00:40:06
Speaker
He ends up being awarded about $700,000 as compensation for the years he spent in prison from the California attorney general and state board of control from the state essentially. And then separately in 2009 Kern County agrees to pay stole $5.5 million dollars for his wrongful prosecution and imprisonment. That's the gist of the Kern County cases in a nutshell.
00:40:31
Speaker
Now, do you remember the memoir Michelle remembers? Have you ever heard of that? It seems like I have, but it nothing comes to mind. OK, so I'll go through like a couple things here. The county ends up paying out around $10 million dollars to settle different claims, the bulk of which goes to John Stoll, because this was the worst case in terms of time. I'm just curious, did his wife go after a child support? Oh, I was not going to. ah ah It would it came up in an earlier case. It's I'm looking fun at something. That's not funny. I'm sorry No, I don't I don't I don't I don't know how that went down here. I was certainly you know she was responsible for the beginning of this, right? Yeah, and and Whether it you know, it's possible. She really did have a ah thought that the guy running the pool house was doing something, right? Yeah
00:41:26
Speaker
But I doubt very seriously she meant for it to do this. No, i see she didn't know this was what was going to happen. She thought she was going to get full custody of her kid. That's what she thought was going to happen. She thought. Man, I wish, it would be nice to think that there was some sort of factual basis for her allegations, but I just, I don't know. It got so out of hand and then to swing all the way back around. I do think that i'm a child that accused their father of something so horrendous at the age of six, I think that there could be a lot of denial involved in ever being able to say like there, that, you know, no, that didn't happen. And and it's not the child's fault.
00:42:04
Speaker
Right. Well, so this case takes a turn. This guy, Ed Sampley, comes forward. He's one of the accusers who's now an adult, like a long time an adult. In 2004, he talks to the New York Times about this case and says it never happened. He claims that everything that he said was a lie and he was told to say it by authorities. John Stoll was in prison for like 20 years for this, but he says that it did not happen.
00:42:32
Speaker
Now, we talked about the compensation, but there is a documentary that comes out, which emphasizes John Stoll's case, it's called Witch Hunt. It was produced and released in 2007. There's another documentary about the John Stoll with the Kern County cases that came out, I think two years later. I i wanted to say this because I thought it was interesting. John Stoll's son did not originally make an accusation against his father. He made an accusation that he had been molested. It does turn out, according to what I dug into here, that one of the people here did have a conviction for child molestation.
Impact of False Allegations and Restitution Disparities
00:43:22
Speaker
And that shocked me, because I think it's real. So I dug into
00:43:31
Speaker
But it had nothing to do with the case, right? Well, so Grant Self, who briefly had rented John Stoll's pool house, he had a previous conviction for child molestation. Right. Now, John Stoll had to wait for his convictions to be overturned and to be released. But Grant Self was in a unique position. He actually had been sent to a mental hospital for sexual offenders because he had prior convictions for child molestation. And when they talk about the Kern County case, Grant Self is the one they can't get past because Grant Self had molested children. And here's what shocked me. I pulled this from the Bakersfield, California. He has two previous convictions in another state,
00:44:25
Speaker
He gets out in 2009, I'm talking about Grant Self, the guy that was renting the pool house. He's rearrested in 2012 and charged with abusing three young boys. In July of 2013, he pleads guilty to sexually abusing three young boys. He's sentenced to five years and 10 months in prison, and then he has to go through the same offender program that he had to before. So in his case, I know this sounds terrible to say, but he gets money. I just want to point that out. He gets money from Kern County, a $725,000 settlement.
00:45:13
Speaker
He seeks compensation from the state of California for some reason, the same California attorney general and state board of control investigators deny his claim where they gave John stole $5 million. dollars I have wondered about this and you tell me what you think and and we'll talk about it. I think that John stole son being so upset about this.
00:45:39
Speaker
and making the accusation, because if you go back and look at what Anne Carlin originally says, she says that she believed that on a recent visit with John Stoll, that Grant Sealth, who was living in the pool house, he rented from John Stoll at the time, had molested their six-year-old son. What if this all starts with a real thing, but then turns out into this crazy snowball effect, Blizzard even,
00:46:09
Speaker
of all these people being sucked in, and Grant Self might have abused this child. Well, that's exactly what I thought at the very beginning, is when all this nonsense occurs, actual victims don't get justice. It's weird, right? Okay, so in the event that that... So it is possible. Now, this illustrates my point further in saying that I don't know if Grant Self was a child molester or not. Okay, however, having given the time, all right, and I would never deny a victim. Okay, I would just I just wouldn't do that. I wouldn't even tell any of these children to their face. At this point in time, they're all older than we are probably. And I wouldn't even say anything because it's not their fault. Okay, this time and place though.
00:47:03
Speaker
The fact that Grant Self had previous convictions that I don't know anything about, OK? Right. For one thing, I don't know why that wasn't relevant when the initial accusation was made. However, that is what happened, right? Right. I would say I have a tendency to believe that child molesters, sexual predators re-offend. Yes.
00:47:33
Speaker
However, I also believe, depending on the circumstances, people who have been accused of being child molesters who otherwise are exonerated at some point have a target on them. Right.
00:47:51
Speaker
And I can absolutely see both sides of a situation where he could have possibly been guilty of a third set of molestation, which by the way, he got like less than they initially, like when Grant self pleaded guilty in 13, he got less time than they all got initially when John still got 20 years or whatever. I noticed that too.
00:48:15
Speaker
And but so it's I don't know if Grant Self is a ah child molester or not. However, I could see where he would not even try to fight it. okay I could see where he could plead guilty. I can also see where he may have done it and he's an awful person. right right I do think, though, that it is a strong testament to the times and to the authorities at work If the initial claim by the child's mom was the one and only actual happening, that would have been so much different, right?
Media Influence on Public Perception and Institutional Failures
00:48:56
Speaker
Yeah. And and it's it illustrates what I'm saying. There are not these groups of random couples and people. It's almost like they painted society as this super evil place. How many people do you know would let something like this go on? Oh, no one. I mean, they act like Caligula is in charge here and that it's just a free for all. And you bring your friends in and you have your child bring their friends in. That is not how this works. Right. Just from having my own child, like people stay on it. And, you know, I've never been offended when somebody, you know, a new kid would come to my house to play with my child and they wanted to see what was up at my house. Right. right fine come in right I mean, I don't believe for a second, the way it ends up being laid out, you just can't find that many bad people all lined up for the picking, basically. And the fact that if he was legitimately abused, yeah
00:49:54
Speaker
And, you know, Grandself had this, he was, whatever he had in his past, again, makes him a target if it it could be rightly so. Definitely think that, you know, there's a reason we have a sex offender registry, right?
00:50:09
Speaker
yeah It's to let people know what you're dealing with. And of course, that didn't apply at this point in time, right? yeah It's possible that nobody had any idea about that. That would be my guess, actually, that they didn't know because I doubt very seriously that his dad would have had him around somebody that had gotten in trouble for that. We also don't know to what extent any of that is, right? We just know that, oh, there were these charges in another state or whatever, right? right Right. And then I do see where somebody might just plead guilty and just be like, screw it. I can't go through this again. Right. I agree with him. But I would also say that he needs to stay away from small children. I tend to agree with that as well. I mean, even if he's not guilty, he just needs, cause you know what? If you're not around them, you can't have done anything. Yeah. It's terrible to have to say things like that, but it's the absolute truth.
00:51:02
Speaker
there's There's a lot of these cases that you can read about. They are, I'll be honest, when you read the court records here, they're not as graphic as you would think they would be, but they are terrible in terms of the acts that children are accusing adults of.
00:51:17
Speaker
So they are a little graphic. It is not going to be the best holiday reading, but it is one of the most fascinating times in the history of the American court system to see this crop up all over the country, all all different jurisdictions. And it takes the courts a while to get a good grasp of what's happening and that we don't have dozens of pedophile rings just running around rampant.
00:51:42
Speaker
I'm still not sure that's cleared up. Like, even to this day, I'm not... Well, that's how we get Pizzagate today. You know, we get these bizarre conspiracies that happen, and a lot of them are rooted in these cases. Or just and the beginning of them, right? Right. A lot of times, the lure of pedophile rings and, like, all this stuff, the lure of it, it doesn't bother to follow up with, oh, and 20 years later, they were all exonerated. None of it ever happened. Yeah. And so we're stuck it with the lure that the media creates and it does a lot of damage. It really does a lot of damage because again, my point now, I have sympathy for people who are accused and convicted and they didn't do anything. But more so than that, I would say that the actual victims of sexual abuse are pushed even further down on the pile.
00:52:41
Speaker
because of this nonsense. that's was what That was one of the things I wanted to bring up here. ah Worth noting, I don't know how this came up. I was reading the sources on different websites and a lot of the material that we use here, we actually just kind of source straight from different court documents and the registry stuff. I want to point out this one interesting source that popped up.
00:53:06
Speaker
This was from Western Michigan University, and it is their Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. welfare um They carried an article by Mary Day Young in December of 2007. This was volume 34. If you go looking for it, it's issue four. It's about a 30-page article with a lot of citations. Now, the title of this article is, Two Decades After McMartin, a Follow-up of 22 Convicted Daycare Employees.
00:53:35
Speaker
If you want to read about some of this stuff, which is kind of where I was headed, because I will be distracted by this all day. If you want to read about this, this has one of the most fascinating looks at how it affected the people that were accused and a lot of little tidbits about how it affected the process overall.
00:53:53
Speaker
It's a really good read. Again, the name of the article is two decades after McMartin, a follow-up of 22 convicted daycare employees, which is not about the Kern County case, but it's about the McMartin case and how it affected the process that Meg was sort of just implying that maybe there were kids that got left behind in all of this. Well, yeah, that and the way accusations are handled. It's very interesting. And this is an older document. It's from 2007. It's a good PDF to read about this. There is one tidbit that stood out in here. No United States governor has ever pardoned and accused in a
00:54:32
Speaker
hysteria case of any kind. I don't know why that stood out to me, but that was very interesting. Well, because they're not you don't want to be the governor that pardoned a convicted a child sexual molester. I don't even know what to say about that. That's fine, but like we should not live in a world where that stigma exists where you cannot legitimately pardon someone accused of molesting children who did not molest children. Right, but they were exonerated otherwise, right?
00:55:01
Speaker
Yeah, they were exonerated in other ways. Yeah. and Okay. Well, that NC to me, like that's where there's this breakdown. and And honestly, it's one of those things where you're like, well, that sucks that that's happening to that other person over there. But like, there's so much taboo and so many things that make you cringe that like, you can't possibly get involved in that, right? Cause you don't want to be sucked into that disaster. And, you know, you watch it happen. And, and you know, there's always like, and i I do it. I do it just like everybody else does, because you're like, what terrible people abusing all those children. Right. Yeah. That's the initial reaction. Of course, it would be terrible if that group of adults were abusing all those children. But again, and it's highly unlikely that that's occurring. And nobody was like, OK, so all these kids are involved, but none of y'all told your parents before now. Nobody said anything.
00:55:54
Speaker
Yeah. And so like, I don't even want to question things like this, which like, how do you erase this from your mind? You don't ever erase it from your mind. You have to have in fact, there's a reason why you don't erase it from your mind. Because it is so terrible. You have to have it at the forefront of your mind. And it it goes along with the premise that that is spoken often and put into play less so that Everyone who is accused of a crime is innocent until they're proven guilty. Okay.
00:56:29
Speaker
And it's very, yeah I would say that the stigma surrounding the accusations of being charged or indicted with abuse that alleges sexual molestation of a young child, I would say that your chances of being innocent until proven guilty go down like 200%, right? Like, yeah not only are you already guilty, they're looking to put you under the jail. right It's a terrible crime, right? It is a terrible crime. It becomes even more so terrible when, like, there's some reason somebody started this stuff, right? Yeah. There's there's other things involved, again, that would make me want to look at the root of the situation before I i started broadening the scope.
00:57:19
Speaker
Well, it's funny that you say that the McMartin case, which I read pretty extensively on, and I think it might be in that Western Michigan article or the journal that I mentioned. ah If not, I'm sure you can find it on the internet. So Judy Johnson is the woman who makes the accusation.
00:57:38
Speaker
in 1983 that a MacMartin teacher named Ray Bucky, he was the grandson of Virginia MacMartin who was the founder of the school, the preschool, sorry. I was looking for the word preschool. She makes this accusation and the cops do something really dumb. On September 8th of 1983, they send out a form letter to 200 and some parents. And the form letter is basically, hey, we're looking into Ray Bucky at the school, we think he's been molested records indicate that your child has been or is currently astute to be here. We are asking for your assistance. Please question your child to see if he or she has been witness to the crime or a victim. Our investigation indicates that possible criminal acts included oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, sodomy, ah possibly under the pretense of having quote taken the child's temperature, photos may have been taken of the children without out their clothing on, any information from your child regarding having been observed ah with Ray Bucky leaving a classroom alone with a child during any quote, nap period, or having observed Ray Bucky bond or tie up a child. So that's how they start all of this. I mean, you wouldn't want to plant any ideas, right? And then it has like capital letters at the bottom saying there's no evidence to indicate the management had anything to do with this. And like, you know,
00:58:59
Speaker
All of this- That's not how that played out at all. No, what's what knows and that letter is terrible, and that's what ultimately sets off the McMartin case, which is slightly different than the current- It's like everybody called in and was like, my child's a victim. Well, right. So Judy Johnson starts this. And while the preliminary stuff for this is going on, because this goes on for years, them trying to figure out what's happening with this McMartin preschool,
00:59:26
Speaker
she dies before the preliminary hearing is even over, she dies. So she doesn't have to live with everything that she brought about here. And the case just gets crazier when she dies. You would think that like her not being able to participate any longer because she had been found to be a chronic alcoholic and she was actually diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenic and a big diagnosed with that like during hospitalizations.
00:59:57
Speaker
So she's the person who kicked off the McMartin case, and then the police ran with that person's statement, and they sent out this form letter to 200 and some families. No wonder it created hysteria. But ultimately, ah my point is, the person dying out of things, it leaves it squarely on the shoulders of the police who sent that letter. They did all of those.
01:00:19
Speaker
And all the other, I mean, I wouldn't say this to their face, but kids jump on. They want to be part of it. They want to be included. They don't have any clue what is even being said. Yeah. Yeah. They have no idea. They just want to be part of it. Yeah. And another thing they did there, like to your point, and the kids wanting to be a part of it, that was weird to me. You know, they ran 360 children through the grand jury proceedings.
01:00:48
Speaker
they picked the 40 best testimony for the pretrial hearings. And by the time they got to the trials, they were only using about 10 kids who had the best like presence on the stand. Now, did those prosecutors feel like they were stopping something? I don't know. But the minute that they were accusing Chuck Norris of being one of the abusers from the pictures, they probably should have stopped right there and like ask a lot of questions.
01:01:14
Speaker
I don't they like these group sessions are not a thing. I refuse to believe that there are look anything like this could line up and be real. I refuse to believe it. You would you would tell like because, you know, there were family members involved.
01:01:31
Speaker
You said you were talking about Ray Bucky and like you know his grandmother founded the daycare. and so like there were family I think his mom, maybe his sister, his grandmother, all these people went on trial. I can tell you what, like most families don't have a pedophile. And I would i would dare to say that like it's highly unlikely.
01:01:52
Speaker
that you're gonna have a multi-generation group of pedophiles, especially opposite genders. It was weird at the time. I think you we started this by talking about like all the women going back to work. Well, this guy, it wasn't really um a normal thing for like a young man to be a daycare preschool teacher, right?
01:02:17
Speaker
right Right. He he had he was at a disadvantage there to begin with, but he was actually like a really hands on. He had grown up and and with his grandmother having the school and like, there he he did nothing wrong. there's nothing he He did nothing inappropriate with these children. Yeah, I watched a series of videos where somebody was talking about one of the defense attorneys going, so the attorneys for the McMartin's, including Ray, they had gone back through and they at one point were able to give an innocent explanation for every bizarre claim. And the video that I watched at the time that I watched it was saying, maybe it's still true. And I was like, oh my God, you're gonna start this over again?
01:03:03
Speaker
um I honestly, like I would just be like, I give up. My life has painted. There's nothing I can do. This ruined
Preventing Future Hysteria and Podcast Credits
01:03:11
Speaker
me. This is this is one of the reasons that like I don't bring up this case a lot, because personally, it is such a disaster to try. like There is no mystery to it all. There is nothing to this. There were a lot of people. like And I know we touched on just a couple of them, and I had questions about one of them, which is why I brought him up today.
01:03:30
Speaker
And then I brought up the one that had been the longest serving out of the Kern County group. But the truth is so many people went to prison that weren't supposed to go to prison on the backs of this. And they do not treat people who abuse children well in prison. So dozens of dozens of people went to prison with a target on their back for having been involved in these bizarre non crimes.
01:03:57
Speaker
And like people who are actually doing these crimes usually get away with that because their victim is so messed up that they can't ever come forward about it. it The whole situation is just completely bass-akwards and... Just, it's just awful. All of it's awful. The McMartin thing, ugh. It pains me to know that like there could be this whole other group of them and it not be the McMartin case because how did the McMartin case even happen? Much less all these other cases.
01:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's why I picked this one because I knew it would be a little less inflammatory, McMartin, but I could tie McMartin into it. It's very difficult for me to like put together these type cases. They really only fit into when we're doing like the home for the holidays cases and I can find some kind of good in all of it having been mostly worked out.
01:04:47
Speaker
I don't have a lot more on this. I didn't know if you had any closing thoughts on this these cases. I hope that this doesn't happen again, ever. I hope that the lesson was learned to the best of you know the ability. i I'm a strong advocate for kids not being victims of anything, but this is not the way to take care of those situations. It's a shame.
01:05:10
Speaker
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01:06:55
Speaker
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01:07:17
Speaker
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01:08:10
Speaker
True Crime XS is brought to you by John and Meg. It's written produced, edited, and posted by John and Meg. You can always support True Crime Access through patreon.com or if you have a story you'd like them to cover, you can reach them at truecrimeaccess.com. Thank you for joining us.
01:08:32
Speaker
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