Mean Justice (68 page)

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.

67
. In persuading the judge, Gindes argued that Barbour’s psychiatric hospitalization and obsession with molestation were irrelevant, even though she was the initial interrogator of the children and the primary conduit of information to the authorities. The judge assigned to hear the
People vs. Kniffen and McCuan
was
none other than Judge Marvin Ferguson, who had just lost the DA’s election to Ed Jagels after being tarred as soft on molesters. Ferguson agreed with Gindes—he ruled that defense lawyers could not use or even see Mary Ann Barbour’s psychiatric records.

68
. Palko later sued Jagels for slander for calling him guilty. The suit was dismissed, though not because it was factually inadequate. Rather, Jagels had the law on his side: Although an ordinary citizen could be sued for such statements, district attorneys are immune from liability, even if they slander someone, so long as they do it in their “official capacity.”

69
. In the ring cases, this fundamental lapse in basic investigating procedures was explained away by asserting that corroboration was unnecessary because of the since disproven axiom that children do not “lie” about such things. One senior sheriff’s investigator, Dan Fredenburg, even cited in court the extensive research conducted by an expert favored by prosecutors, Roland Summit, who originated the concept of “Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome,” which purports to explain how children who denied being molested were actually lying in order to protect their parents. The sheriff’s investigator testified that Summit’s research proved that, once a child got past this syndrome and admitted to being molested, only a negligible fraction of the resulting molestation allegations were ever found to be fabricated. There is no doubt this investigator, along with most of his colleagues in Kern County, genuinely believed these “research” findings to be true. The only problem was, no such research had ever been conducted—not by Summit, nor by anyone else. Roland Summit, by his own admission in a deposition in
State of Florida vs. Bob Fijnje,
Dade County Circuit Court Case No: 89-43952 (filed as Exhibit 64 to In Re Kniffen), had never even treated child victims of sexual abuse. It is true that some children deny being molested out of shame or fear or because they don’t want a loved one—even an abusive loved one—harmed or jailed. Common sense and experience, not research, attests to that. But it is also indisputable that the vast majority of genuine research on the subject shows that children
do
tell untruths about a great many things, including molestation—particularly when asked leading, suggestive questions that telegraph to the child what the questioner wants to hear. In study after study (see, among many examples,
Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck,
Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony
[New York: American Psychological Association, 1995]), false allegations, and even false memories, have been produced in children through exactly the sort of questioning used by social workers, sheriff’s detectives and DAs in the ring cases of Kern County. When leading questions are used with young children, it can be impossible to weed out truth from fiction, these studies show. Indeed, young children may not be able to distinguish fact from fiction once subjected to such questioning, and though they may be trying earnestly to tell the truth, they may still deliver factually false testimony. The authorities prosecuting the molestation rings in Kern County (and in other communities where such cases have and continue to crop up) remained curiously unaware of such studies, or, when forced to acknowledge their existence in court, have dismissed them as defense-attorney propaganda, rebutting them with Summit’s phantom research. The notorious McMartin Preschool ring case in Los Angeles was undone in this same way, when proof of the suggestive questioning of children was finally brought before jurors.

The lack of evidence to corroborate the children’s stories was not the only striking absence in the ring cases. Another was that no other police agency in Kern County ever found any signs of molestation rings operating in their jurisdictions; only the Kern County Sheriff’s Department could find them. As it turned out, the sheriff’s department was also the only police agency that permitted social workers and the DA’s abuse coordinators, Carol Darling and Velda Murillo, to participate in and sometimes run the initial interviews with suspected victims (a practice later criticized by Ed Jagels, though at the time he praised Carol Darling and received regular briefings from her). This unusual partnership evolved in part because none of the sheriff’s personnel had been adequately trained in the art of investigating child-molestation cases, not even the sheriff’s sergeant in charge, Brad Darling—husband to Carol Darling. Source: Attorney General John Van de Kamp, “Report on the Kern County Child Abuse Investigation,” September 1986; Andrew Gindes,
Crimes Against Children,
(1996), self-published; Nathan and Snedeker,
Satan’s Silence;
and the author’s interviews with Snedeker and Gindes.