Here's Ray Buckey's published comments from 1990 after the evil circus which came to his town to destroy him and his family finally ran its course:
"People come up to me all the time and say, "Congratulations, I never believed it for a minute," "I hope you sue somebody," and "How did you get through it?"
If you had asked me before the case started if I could have gotten through everything that happened, I would have told you no. I was an average southern California boy who didn't make waves. I was coasting through life and I was just happy. Then the case started.
I felt disbelief, shock, anger, and finally fear when I realized this wasn't going to end. People were not going to step back and see what they were doing. My whole family went through a two-year preliminary hearing, going into court daily from 9:00 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. We listened to people lie and watched a system we had thought worked bent on destroying our family.
Then I went back to the jail cell and walked through a system where people were trying to kill me, or would kill me if they could. I watched the news media smear my family, smear my name, and drag me across the coals with allegations so absurd that they were beyond comprehension. I watched my family being ripped apart, their houses taken, and all their savings gone.
As the case kept growing, I kept seeing things that were outrageous. Society was turning against a family that had been there for three generations. I just watched that being destroyed until one day, which I will remember my whole life, we were all arrested.
I was fortunate enough to have a religious background and to have a lawyer who had a metaphysical outlook on life. He put it this way to me the first time I met him: All men have to face a dragon along their path of life and it is not so much whether you bite the dragon or the dragon bites you. How you handle yourself facing the dragon is how you are going to be the rest of your life — that is the person you are going to be.
You have to live one day at a time, you have to learn to find happiness no matter where you are, and you have to learn to compartmentalize the moments in your life where you can find happiness and hold them in. There are still times when I don't know how I got through what I got through but I can give credit to two main things: One was my family and friends, and the other was a faith in what might be called God, life, or a belief that life has meaning. I held on to these and that got me through.
My lawyer taught me early on that the whole person goes through this type of experience — the body, mind and soul. I learned that exercise was the therapy for my body, that being very involved in my case was the therapy for my mind, but that for my soul, I had to find meaning in life. I could never explain why we, or why anybody, goes through these cases other than for a spiritual experience of growth. I got through five years of jail by the belief that it doesn't matter if I go to prison or not — I know I am innocent and I know my friends and family know lam innocent so I can deal with prison.
I went to jail and had two parts to my life — the courtroom and the jail. I was happier in the jail than I was sitting in a courtroom watching a circus. The courtroom was a joke. It was watching people manipulate a system and watching the media pump out publicity that was so absurd I couldn't believe people accepted it.
I didn't have anything to escape with. I didn't have drugs, I didn't have alcohol, I didn't have therapy, so what happened to me was that I turned inward. It was the only place I had to go. The whole world around me was saying I was a bad person, I was terrible, and I had done things that I knew I hadn't. So I turned inward.
In jail they all wanted to kill me. They hated me. They thought I was a child molester. In the courtroom I listened to lies and watched my family being raped. I didn't have a world to go to for escape. I lived in it 24 hours a day.
But I didn't want pity. I realized that the only person who was going to get me out of this hell was myself. So I learned to deal with what I was going through and this became my life. I didn't think I was ever going to get out of jail, but I felt life was worth living for and that got me through a lot.
I went to the peak of happiness when I saw my family acquitted. I cried for the first time in years. But I was more afraid when the second trial started than I was for the first because, as any lawyer will tell you, a jury trial is a crapshoot. I knew that if they focused on just a little part in the McMartin case, they couldn't see the whole story and understand what was really going on. But part of my therapy at that time was being very involved in the case. I took a co-counsel position and became like a second lawyer in the courtroom. I saw myself growing.
The strange thing for me is that after the two trials were over, although everybody assumed my life would now be great, it's not. Life doesn't begin again with the end of a trial. Life still goes on. Life has its ups and downs, it's still a rocky road. But not having an axe wielded over my head makes a big difference. I have learned that the things I learned in jail still hold true for me. I still live one moment at a time. I still find happiness in the moments that I can because life is still scary. I don't know what is going to happen.
I have had to accept that society put us through the mill and spit us out and now has turned its back on us. I don't look toward society to find my happiness. I don't look toward them to find worth, to pick up my family's pieces."
^ The words of an innocent man who survived being at the very apex of a fabricated sweeping witch hunt so terrible that it's difficult to put into words. A witch hunt of the highest order designed to completely destroy him and his family that was based in legal quackery, media frenzy, and unsubstantiated societal fear.
Ray did not beat a giraffe to death in front of the children with a baseball bat, he did not fly around on broom sticks, there were no pagan human child sacrifices conducted followed by vampire blood drinking, he didn't capture and execute sea turtles, he didn't transform into a goat man using satanic powers, he didn't pack children like sardines into crates and force them to fly in hot air balloons, he didn't drill holes in children's underarms with a power drill, he didn't sexually abuse anyone, and he didn't dig a series of underground tunnels. He didn't do any of these things.
^ The real McMartin "tunnels," hand made by Charles Buckey for the school's tots to play in, above ground. The so-called tunnels, shown here at the original McMartin school, were later transported to the new school at 931 Manhattan Beach Boulevard. There were no other tunnels at the preschool, either above or below ground. (Photo courtesy of Peggy Buckey).
All he did was a diligent job as an employee of a Christian preschool that had a good reputation before CRAZY came to town.
No thanks to Allin for re-falsely accusing an innocent man.
