Allegations and the Beginning of Panic

 

It began with a mother’s fear—and ended with a nation’s panic.

The story of the McMartin Preschool scandal, one of the most infamous cases of mass hysteria in American history, starts not with a bang, but with a whisper in the sunny, affluent community of Manhattan Beach, California. In the late summer of 1983, a woman named Judy Johnson made a phone call to the police. Her allegation was specific and horrifying: her two-and-a-half-year-old son had been sexually abused by a man named Raymond Buckey, an employee at the preschool her child attended.

That single accusation was the spark that lit a firestorm. The initial police investigation was methodical, if clumsy. They interviewed the child, who, under questioning, corroborated his mother’s claims. On September 7, 1983, Ray Buckey and his mother, Virginia McMartin, the school’s founder, were arrested. But the nightmare was only beginning.

The true mechanism of the panic, however, was not the arrest itself, but the letter. In a move that would prove catastrophically reckless, the Manhattan Beach Police Department, lacking concrete physical evidence, decided to cast a wide net. They drafted a letter to be sent to the parents of every current and former student of the McMartin Preschool.

Imagine the scene in those manicured suburban homes. A formal letter arrives, bearing the official seal of the police. A parent opens it, expecting a community bulletin or a fundraising notice. Instead, they read a chilling warning. The letter stated that Ray Buckey was under investigation for child molestation. It urged parents to question their own children about possible abuse, suggesting specific, grotesque acts and asking if they had been taught “sex games,” photographed nude, or taken to other locations.

The letter was a script for panic. It didn’t just inform; it implanted terrifying imagery into the minds of hundreds of parents. The atmosphere in Manhattan Beach shifted overnight. Whispers at the supermarket checkout line turned into frantic conversations in driveways. The sunny, safe veneer of the beachside community cracked, revealing a deep, primal fear. Parents looked at their children with new, anxious eyes, searching for signs of a trauma the letter had now convinced them was not only possible, but probable.

Therapists and social workers, some operating with questionable techniques, were brought in to interview the children. They used leading questions, dolls, and suggestive prompts, unwittingly coaxing out a cascade of increasingly fantastical allegations. The initial allegation against one man snowballed into a sprawling narrative of satanic rituals, secret tunnels, and abuse by a network of perpetrators that included other teachers. The parents’ genuine fear, stoked by the police letter and amplified by a media frenzy desperate for a sensational story, created a feedback loop of hysteria. The truth became the first casualty.

What began as one mother’s accusation, filtered through the clumsy machinery of an overzealous investigation, became a national spectacle. It was a perfect storm of good intentions warped by primal fear, demonstrating how easily the bedrock desire to protect children can be manipulated to tear a community—and ultimately, the truth—apart.