Was There Some Truth To The Allegations In The McMartin Preschool Case?

Back in the 1980's there was a panic about the sexual abuse of children as part of Satanic rituals. One of the main cases that prompted the public panic involved allegations of the abuse of hundreds of children at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, CA. As Wikipedia describes it:

The McMartin preschool trial was a day care sexual abuse case in the 1980s, prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner. Members of the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were charged with numerous acts of sexual abuse of children in their care. Accusations were made in 1983. Arrests and the pretrial investigation ran from 1984 to 1987, and the trial ran from 1987 to 1990. After six years of criminal trials, no convictions were obtained, and all charges were dropped in 1990. When the trial ended in 1990, it had been the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history. The case was part of day-care sex-abuse hysteria, a moral panic over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s.

And to be sure, the case presented some very strange accusations that were too incredible to believe, like something from a bad LSD trip. There was also evidence that the investigators had used leading questions and other techniques to get the "information" they wanted from the children.

Videotapes of the interviews also showed that MacFarlane and other therapists relied heavily on leading questions and subtle pressure to persuade children to join the chorus of accusers. The defense played tapes that showed therapist Shawn Connerly telling a child interviewee that 183 kids had already revealed "yucky secrets" and that all the McMartin teachers were "sick in the head" and deserved to be beaten up.

Some of the children's accounts included being taken into tunnels and hidden rooms beneath the school.

No evidence was found of the "secret rooms" where massive instances of sexual abuse were said to have taken place. In March 1985, a group of nearly fifty McMartin parents, determined to unearth the fabled secret tunnels, began digging at a lot next to the school. A few days later, the parents were joined in their efforts by an archeological firm hired by the District Attorney's office. Still, no secret rooms were ever discovered.

(Source).

     But was that true? Brian Niemeier reports on files released by the FBI about a cult called "The Finders" that indicate that tunnels were, in fact, found. (H/t Western Rifle Shooters Association). The FBI file contains a report stating that large hand dug tunnels and subterranean room were found beneath the McMartin Pre-School's structure. (You can download a copy of the FBI file here--the report is on page 49 of the PDF). The inclusion of the material also suggests that someone at the FBI thought that the McMartin pre-school incident might be connected to The Finders.

     As Vox Day writes about this, "[t]he world is not only more evil than you believe, it is more evil than you probably imagine."