James Toward

Dear Reader,

Incalculable harm has been done to a “small” number of members of a small community, in a small county, in Florida. Lives have been blighted, relationships destroyed, marriages torn asunder, children’s faith in themselves, their parents and society damaged. I have no illusions of righting the innumerable wrongs done by those single-minded “experts” in this case; their work is done never to be undone.

No! My declaration is to encourage those Glendale students caught in the web of – deceit, dispute, and despondency, to make a supreme effort to have this moment be their “point of return.” To them I say, rebuild those damaged areas of your personalities; curiosity, delight in learning, the buoyancy and love of life, the readiness to be friendly -make friends. Yes, to be friendly and make friends, to learn to trust because that was the stage in your development that was broken. There is no shame or disgrace attached to you, because they belong to the adults who tried to put them on you. They tried to convince you that you were damaged when you were not; you were a whole, good person in the making when last I saw you. Go ahead! You are still young and have lives ahead of you to complete your healing.

My name is James Toward; I was 57 years of age, 1987, when the police and the Health and Rehabilitation Services (HRS), now called Department of Children and Families Services (DCFS), came to the Glendale Montessori School to remove all the records of children enrolled for the previous three years. Another team from the same agencies searched my home where I lived with my wife, Rosario, and our daughter Margaret. I am now 78 years old and I have been incarcerated for over twenty years.

I accepted a plea agreement for a 27-year sentence plus 10 years probation in order to protect my family and teaching staff from the threat of arrest. Unfortunately my office manager was arrested the same day that I was taken into custody. After more than a year in jail she took a plea for 10 years and probation. Her name is Brenda and she had the offer to go free if she had testified against me. She was 30 years old and married with plans to have her first child the following year.

I finished my sentence in 12 years with time off for good behavior. During the years 1991 to 1998 I helped teach hundreds of inmates the principles of “Growth Orientation Preparation” (GOPREP) developed by a private company to help inmates succeed in society, ­and I trained those interested in becoming facilitators to teach the GOPREP principles. GOPREP was highly successful during the prison time I spent with it.

Instead of release, August 1, 1999, to go on probation, I was taken to the DCFS center for the Sex Offender Treatment Program. This involuntary incarceration is Florida’s reaction to an earlier crime committed against a little boy leaving him dead. It might have had more merit in everyone’s eyes if it had been carried out as a prison program and part of the original sentence. None of my family, my staff, or myself committed any crime against the Glendale students.

In retrospect, I remember the McMarttin case, which began in the early 1980’s located in Manhattan Beach, California, and my feelings of horror and sadness for the terrible abuses done to those innocent children by the daycare owners and staff. I believed it all. The horror was greater because my wife, Rosario, and I also had a school for children. We could not conceive of anyone depraved enough to violate the children entrusted to their care. There were other cases like this one spreading across the country like a series of tornados – unpredictable and unstoppable, wreaking total destruction on the schools and the lives of all they touched. The McMartin’s Preschool case was the first I had heard of. We experienced a new depth of horror when a “tornado” hit Martin County sending our small community reeling with the shocking news that our school, Glendale Montessori, was under investigation for almost the same kind of charges of child abuse that had been leveled at McMartin’s Preschool.

We had, Rosario and I, both traveled to Italy by different routes, in 1970 to study the method of education designed by Dr. Maria Montessori for the child from birth through high school. Our interests were in the elementary level being offered that year and we studied in the same group. By the end of the school year, we had decided to marry and work at a school in South Florida. Ten years later we moved to Stuart, FL. We loved Martin County from the start with its quiet neighborhoods and beautiful scenery. Rosario particularly liked Jensen Beach for the sea and the sun. We began building our school – one class at a time – and by the beginning of the school year, 1987-1988, we had a thriving educational alternative to traditional education with classes for 160 students from toddlers through Middle School, and a staff of 20 female teachers and aides including the office manager, who had worked for the school for five years.

The horror became personal at the end of August 1987, on the Friday of our first week of school, when at 5:00pm, detectives from the sheriff’s department, accompanied by an HRS worker, entered the school office. They explained that the school was under investigation because of a complaint of child abuse and they were there to pick up the personal files of the students enrolled in school, including those in past years. I noticed that they had parked their car at the entrance to the school blocking anyone from entering. I immediately told them to move the car so that parents of the students could enter to pick up their children. They refused until I went outside to insist it be moved, in a rather loud voice, at which time they decided to move the car. Once more in the school office, I told the officers that I would call an attorney for advice regarding the student files. The attorney spoke to the officer in charge and then my attorney told me to give him the files and be in his office Monday morning.

The horror quickly turned to terror for as I was getting the files together I was told that a group of officers were at my home and would only wait half an hour for someone to open the door before breaking in. I asked Rosario to go to our house to let the detectives in. One of the parents of our school, who was picking up her children, caught the gist of what was going on and volunteered to take our daughter to her home with her and her children. Our daughter, who was 13 years old, left with her friends without knowing what was taking place at school. Rosario drove home and when she enetered our driveway, there were approximately ten cars parked there. Not knowing what to do she obeyed the orders from the female detective to open the door and go into the living room while the police searched the house.

At school, I let the police take the files they wanted and drove home sometime later. Our attorney had advised me not to speak to anyone about the situation. He’d also said this would all blow over within a week. I drove home. When I arrived, I found Rosario sitting in the living room talking with two women, a detective Margaret A. Schwarz and an HRS investigator, Lynn Ayers.

I sat next to Rosario for several hours while the two “friendly” women pried and questioned us asking, “Who was the person who wanted to do us harm?” and “What had I or Rosario done to someone who wanted revenge? We did not understand. We sat and wondered what was happening. Around 10 o’clock at night, we saw the detectives walking out with about eight paper bags. When the sergeant-in-charge, Sgt. Wall, asked me to sign a paper which had no details other than there were eight bags of “evidence” I, at first, refused because I had no idea what was taken, but eventually I felt the pressure of two police standing over me, Detective Schwarz and Sgt. Wall, when I had no idea what my rights were and signed. There was to be another time, almost two years in the future, when I would face a similar dilemma and sign in the face of an implacable authority. At last we were alone and walked through the house. Everything had been turned upside down, mainly in our office. Drawers were open, boxes turned over, clothes were scattered, and closets were emptied. We felt violated.

The following Wednesday evening we called a parent and staff meeting at the school. Questions were asked and answered regarding the only thing we were sure of, “that there had been reports of a child being abused.” All families had received a notice to that effect from the HRS/police. We assured the parents the best we could that no child had been abused in the past and there would be none in the future. We will be forever grateful to those parents, the majority, who kept their children in Glendale for the whole of that school year. Their support kept our spirits up and gave us the determination to see it through to the end, no matter how bitter. We were not aware of how bitter things would get. I took our lawyer’s advice and stayed away from the school hoping the turmoil would die down. Rosario taught at the Elementary level with the help of another teacher, while keeping up the administrative duties, supported by our office manager, and maintained the school routine.

This all took place on the surface while inside we both lived in a state of anxiety relieved from time to time by flashes of ‘promising’ news from our lawyer. Our daughter, Margaret, know about the initial accusations and the fact that her father did not go to work at the school, beyond that, none of us know anything more. Margaret continued at school and spent a few more weekends than usual at her friends’ homes during the school year. I didn’t read the local newspapers or radio and TV news because of the articles, which continually painted lurid details of what had supposedly gone on with certain of our students over the past year or two and I discouraged Rosario from telling me anything concerning the complaints. As more and more pieces of news were made available about the ongoing police investigation, the gossip increased. Rosario was inundated with gossip every day at school. Newspapers and TV reporters hovered around the school for news and were hunting the parents for more scandalous details. I refused to read or to listen to the continual stream of scenarios someone was inventing or disclosing to feed the media frenzy. I still believed in the process of justice.

I was arrested on March 1, 1988, as was Brenda, our office manager, no bail was allowed to either of us. After I had spent about 15 months in jail, I was taken to court for jury selection and when it became clear that there would be no possibility of getting enough people who had not been infected by the overwhelming media publicity a change of venue was granted and I was moved to the jail in Vero Beach. That evening I called my wife and she told me that the lawyer had informed her there were three warrants issued for her arrest and for two of the staff. I asked her to get verification of the warrants and I would call her the following day. Rosario and the lawyer had been through this scenario several times since I was arrested, i.e. continually telling her that she was going to be arrested and Rosario going home to prepare and wait for the police, who never arrived. It had taken a terrible toll on her physically and emotionally. The following day she told me that a trusted friend had verified the existence of the warrants and I asked her to tell our lawyer I would accept the plea agreement. This offer of 27 years in prison plus ten years on probation that had been held out to me several times during our various appearances in court, did not influence me, for I was set on go to trial, “come hell or high water,” I ended up getting both. The thought of Rosario or any of my staff being placed in the women’s cell with it’s continuous uproar; a situation that had caused my office manager to be placed under the care of a psychologist, (for almost the entire time she was there) was more than I could stand. On the eve of my trial, in order to put an end to the continuing threat of even more arrests of the Glendale staff (three teachers including Rosario), I signed an agreement that has turned out to be a life sentence.

Also during this time, our office manager had accepted a plea agreement for a sentence of ten years plus probation, rather than accept the offer of her freedom if she would lie about me and implicate me in the abuse charges. My wife and I were in the courtroom when she made her plea, with tears streaming down her face, while she cried, “I did not touch those children”, over and over again, to a stoney-faced Judge Dwight Geiger, her family also in tears and devastated by the injustice done to a daughter who was forced to accept a plea to spend her next years in prison rather than spend the rest of her life living with a lie in her heart. In the five years she had worked at the school, I learned how deeply she loved the children. She was about 30 years of age and she and her husband had planned to have their first child the following year. That was an end for this very loyal and dedicated employee, but only in the sense of knowing that the next years of her life, incarcerated, would be time she would spend counting the days to freedom. What she didn’t know was that freedom is relevant and she will never be free, waking or sleeping, of the feelings of anger and helplessness, which inflame the scars and still-open wounds in her heart and on her soul and will for the remainder of her life. I know these things to be true because she and I were in adjoining cells in the jail, and I spoke with her briefly once a week at the canteen where she was eventually given some work to do. I also draw upon the experiences my family and I have had at the hands of our justice system by the very people elected “By the People” to preserve justice in our land. We have lived 22 years chained in mind and deed by the overpowering force of a system run amok. My family also grieves over the loss of husband, father, and the innocence of living in a country where such things never happen, for such was our state of mind in those halcyon days in Martin County in the early 1980’s.

In the McMartin case the following six years brought an unsatisfactory resolution to both sides with acquittals for 63 year old Peggy McMartin Buckey after 22 months in jail and her son Raymond Buckey after spending five years in jail. There was to be no closure for those who claimed to be abused and none for Mrs. Buckey and her son.

In the Glendale case, a new development took place that was to delight those who claimed abuse and bring despair to my family for, having completed my lawful prison sentence, I was once again facing trial this time on speculation that I might possibly commit a crime sometime in the future. This new situation was due to the introduction of The Jimmy Ryce Act which was first formulated in 1998 as a criminal law, and came into effect January I, 1999. Because all detainees had completed their prison sentences and had committed no further crimes this constituted Double Jeopardy and was Unconstitutional. This anomaly was legislated away by simply renaming it a civil law and was delivered, by our legislators, with great jubilation, April 1999.

Based on my original sentence I have an agreement with the State of Florida signed by then Judge Dwight Geiger and District Attorney Bruce Colton in 1989, to be allowed to leave the USA permanently at the end of my prison sentence, instead of doing the probation period. My daughter, Margaret, was prepared to travel with me and all was ready for the fateful day, August 1, 1999. My family had been corresponding regularly with the British Vice-Consul in Orlando since 1998, and he in turn had informed the government in London of my intention of returning to Great Britain. I notified the district attorney, a month in advance, of my intention to accept the proviso in the plea agreement and leave the country permanently. Much to my surprise I was taken, two weeks before I was due to complete my sentence, to Martin Correctional Institution and from there, on August 1, walked to the Martin Treatment Center to become a detainee under the newly enacted Jimmy Ryce Act.

I had completed my end of the bargain, in full, only to learn that I was to be tried in civil court to decide if I was likely to commit any sex offenses in the future. “In the future” will be predicted in a court of law, by a new breed of (psychic) called psychologists and psychiatrists, who make their living “evaluating” those “clients,” of the Department of Children and Families (DCF), (the old HRS resurrected), who are likely to commit future crimes. Although I was given tests, which showed that I was below the cut-off point for recidivism (not likely to commit sex crimes in the future) the psychiatrist, Dr. Ray Waldman, decided he would rather trust the erroneous police reports and together with his team-partner psychologist Dr. Ada Ramirez­Brouwer, who also chose to believe the completely false HRS/ police reports, disregarded the very evaluation test results for which they had been trained. Unfortunately the first criteria are the original crimes that our community leaders were determined to believe had really occurred. Because I know those crimes had never taken place I am said to be in denial. Now I am one of the detainees waiting, what is turning out to be, a life sentence under the guise of treatment.

It didn’t seem to occur to anyone, other than my first Jimmy Ryce lawyer, William Carpenter of Orlando, that if I had left the USA permanently, as agreed, I would be some other country’s problem, namely Great Britain, and not costing the State of Florida’s taxpayers over $50,000 per year – count them up so far, 9 years to date, and then project the future costs when it is decided that I am in denial and therefore not eligible for the program until I admit to the crimes I know I did not commit. I believe our community leaders could have found some way to spend those four hundred and fifty thousand plus dollars on something to help the community, such as education, services for the needy, etc. Even repairing the potholes in the road would have served the community better than throwing the money away to protect the society of a foreign country quite able to protect itself. That is, unless the decision had nothing to do with protection and everything to do with punishment.

There are other characters in this type of scenario i.e. mass child abuse, called: therapists, mental health nurses, social workers, etc. who also make a living in the sex abuse arena.

In the McMartin case one of the social workers suggested it would be a change from the norm to hear the children tell their stories without the need of prompting. This obviously avoids the issue of not knowing how to listen to children talk without feeling the need to hurry them along, keep them on track, clear up the problem of some particular inconsistency, etc. and just allow them to get to the point, if they have a point, in their own good time. It is this rush to accept the worst in people that has sent numerous investigations in the wrong direction ultimately destroying, with the able assistance of the media, families and daycare centers alike.

In the early 1980′s the McMartin case started what has been called a rush of hysterical claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) across the country. Since the mid 1990’s, the claims and accompanying hysteria have since died down due in large part to the focus on child vulnerability to incorrect investigative techniques. Educational researchers in the field of psychology have done numerous field tests and documented exactly how errors occur when analyzing the very young child.

In the Glendale case, the first complaint came from a young mother who was part of a dysfunctional family and who desperately needed an explanation for her only son’s unacceptable behavior at home. She certainly got one, but not the correct one, and started the “tornado” that was to destroy not only the school, which had kept her son in the most supportive and promising environment available, but also to wreck the lives of all those children he considered to be his friends, and their families. He answered the one question he could not answer truthfully, “Who else was there?” Because he wasn’t “there” himself, he named Mr. T, Ms. Brenda and his friends and teachers at school, thus branding them in police records as child victims and possible adult child-­molesters. This labeling opened them up to suspicion for the remainder of their lives. He was four years old.

Those children of Glendale who were questioned over and over again by parents, police, HRS personnel, social workers, therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists until they described the images the adults insisted upon hearing will have been rewarded for their “truthfulness” with a haunting memory which never happened in real life but which will affect their reality for the rest of their days. If the questioning gave the children the “right” images, the follow up therapy sessions will have made those images indelible.

Over the years I have been haunted by thoughts of those six students, all boys, who had become the focal point of the hysteria, which had swept the community, started in 1987 by one mother’s unhappiness. I don’t blame her for she too was a “victim” unduly influenced, by an “expert”, the only child-psychiatrist in town. I knew the children were growing older, always subject to dreams of terror with waking moments of shan1e and guilt, hate and fear, and my heart ached for those dan1aged lives, it still does, it always will. In 1999 a 15-year-old girl, who apparently attended Glendale, saw a news item with my picture and the information that I was about to be released, at that news she, “… decompensated and required psychiatric hospitalization …. ” I don’t know this lady’s name but she must be in her middle twenties at this time. What on earth was done to her in the therapy she was given? She bears a burden shared by those ex students and their families who bought into the propaganda and gave more power to the negative forces at work in our community. I wish there was a therapy to reverse the effects of the “therapy” that started the trend at Glendale. My daughter, now 34-years-of-age, still relies on a counselor and will, all of her life. Her mother holds on to her anger and anguish, probably for life. I can only imagine how Brenda our office manager, is handling her ruined life. As for myself, I was blindsided just like everyone else with possibly less of an excuse than the parents because I held a Masters Degree in the field of Early Childhood Education and might have had some inkling of what could occur under extreme conditions. Nevertheless, other than my personal reaction to the McMartin scandal, I considered it an aberration; it was not even conceivable that it could happen at Glendale.

On March 1, 1988, the day of my arrest, there were many similar cases brewing:

1983 McMartin’s Preschool, CA

1984 Fells Acres Daycare, MA

1988 Glendale Montessori School, FL (40-50 claimed abuse)

1988 Wee Care Nursery School, NJ (20 children claimed abuse)

1989 Little Rascal Daycare, NC (90 children claimed abuse)

Accusations in the Glendale case were amazingly similar to those of many other schools and day-cares hundreds even thousand of miles away, and with those listed above, e.g. multiple sex acts with victims; drinking urine, eating feces, ritualistic abuse, killing animals, others more bizarre, if that is possible, included, pulling a gun and shooting the police; molesting children in a hot air balloon; setting the house on tire; tying one to a tree naked with all the children standing around; taking turns with the secretary stabbing him in the chest, etc. Years later it became clear that the sex-abuse “specialists” had spread their “method” of interviewing children suspected of having been abused to other, social and police, agencies across the country.

How on earth can a rational adult give credence to these trumped up claims? Why would anyone think that anyone of these atrocities wouldn’t cause a preschool child to throw up and refuse to pal1icipate in normal family activities and scream his head off for as long as he had the strength? Why would a child, so treated, not fling himself at the parent picking him up at school, screaming at the top of his lungs? Why would a child walk happily into school each morning after such revolting treatment? Tell me why no adult heard anything from some other child at the school about the strange occurrences going on? Just don’t tell me it’s because of threats to the child of doing something bad to the parents if he told anyone. This age child, 3 and 4, doesn’t have sufficient mental development necessary to hide physical signs of terror. An average child at this age will turn to its primary provider with any problem or need that comes to its mind; at a later age it may experience guilt, shame, or fear and not be able to express the problem so easily, but even then it would take some serious lack of trust for it not to do so.

The first child to complain … Wait! None of the children complained. Let me say it another way, the first child did not complain; he was placed in professional hands because his mother complained about behavior at home that had been going on since before he first attended Glendale. She and I spoke about it at school on several occasions. The mother got a new position working for a child psychiatrist who interrogated the child, and after many attempts to get a coherent story the mother and doctor were left with only the names of his friends, supplied by the child, and the supposed actions that were supplied by the doctor. That is what I finally understood when I eventually heard and read about some of the crimes that were supposed to have happened at our school.

Many years were to pass before I learned of how the Mondale Act of 1979, designed to aid children in distress, and I’m sure it did, unleashed large amounts of money for investigators to seek out abused children. The obsessive zeal of some of those investigators caused untold havoc across the country incapacitating, entire family structures and their daycare partners. Does this sound familiar? I am not referring to a parent who may be excused for a violent emotional reaction to news of possible harm to a child. No, I refer to the professional, the expert, the man or woman who has spent 6 to 8 years or more studying the profession of mental health, then after a number of years experience in the field, to forget or ignore the most obvious basic fact of human life on earth -the very young will suffer or die without help from an older member of the race, preferably the parent; thus dependency on the adult becomes a necessity of life. Through erroneous methods of questioning, each child was coerced into agreeing with the adults who, like his parents, painted lurid pictures of what had been done to him. In time the child accepted these pictures. I have mentioned earlier of the pressure I personally experienced when the two police officers, authority figures of our community, quietly forced me to sign a paper in my home by simply standing near me until I signed.

In order to learn the lessons of survival the young have a receptive mind with a particular sensitivity toward the main provider. This sensitivity for, among other things, developing trust, lasts for a period of time before becoming less intense and not as critical to survival. At this time it diminishes in intensity to provide room for other life supporting instincts. If the “Sensitive Period” (Thc Montessori Method) is interrupted before its time there will be behavior problems, parents and day care personnel are familiar with the problems first hand: bed-wetting, tantrums, nightmares, refusing to go to bed, lack of appetite, fear of the dark, etc.

It is this sensitive period that is being utilized, knowingly or unknowingly, by the adults

i.e. parents or providers, which means anyone who has been recognized, authorized, or otherwise given the cloak of trustworthiness by the primary provider-parent. Parents know it takes some time and effort to get this age child to accept another person as a surrogate provider, such as babysitter, daycare worker, teacher, doctor, nurse, policeman, etc.–all of whom are more effective with the very young if they have even a common-sense approach to human behavior.

How much more then should we expect from the social worker, police investigator, psychiatric nurse, psychotherapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, all of whom specialized in the mind and emotions of human behavior -of children? Of children who have been placed in their care, for minutes, hours, days, even years because of extreme conditions, at least in some part of their lives? How much more should we expect from these “darlings of society” who command so much respect? How much more? I mentioned daycare personnel earlier and I believe that of all the possible people in the world to commit the crimes claimed by these “experts”, they would be the last. To get several of them in a group to participate in child torture is beyond the wildest of imaginations.

Hypothetically, to gain cooperation from anyone requires one of two conditions -Love or Fear. Yes, there are all of the degrees in between the two and beyond, I simplify to make the point that they arc all emotions and emotions heal or harm depending on the ministrations of the primary provider. Psychotherapists are required to understand the sensitivity of the mind and to approach the discovery process with great care in order to reveal the trauma, if any, and then and only then, treat the condition in a professional manner without forcing preconceived ideas on the patient. Apparently the provider(s) charged with discovering what trauma, if any, had occurred in the Glendale student mentioned earlier and successfully treating it, were unable to meet the test. There had to have been serious Haws in the application of therapeutic skills for a 15-year-old to collapse, to the point of requiring hospitalization, for fear of something that never occurred to her physical body but was evidently present in her emotional body. The therapist should at the very least have allayed the fear of further trauma, even if there were no guarantees, to allow her to function mentally without fear of a complete shut down caused by her emotional state more than 10 years after the supposed trauma took place. I use the word ‘supposed’ when even with my limited knowledge it is more than likely this condition had its roots in early childhood. My intention is to remove Glendale in the reader’s mind as a cause at this point without denying it was a very important factor. Of course I don’t know if she had therapy and if so, how intense and for how long but obviously her reaction to the news of my coming freedom connects her to the school in some highly significant way.

I know the mental health professionals, and the police investigators, played a huge part in the crippled condition of those 3 and 4 year olds who were still in the early stages of gaining their independence, and who have grown older in body with some critical part of their minds unable to cope and with their emotional growth stunted to the point of incapacitation when faced with anxiety. Thus, having an undeveloped sense of trust, as in the case of the 15 year-old that was unable to place faith in her primary providers to furnish some sort of protection for her. They, her primary providers, are also victims in a very real sense. She will need extensive counseling for a very long time and will function adequately with someone who provides support in times of crises; such is the case with my daughter. When the health professionals got through, it became a ‘fait accompli’ with nothing left for the student to fall back on. The poignancy lies in the fact that whether I had left the USA permanently in 1999 or stayed in prison for life, this deep-rooted trauma would still manifest in those areas of her life requiring trust. I apologize to the family for using their child as an example. She is the only one I have heard about and this may help her and others to find closure.

Dear former students, you were not abused nor were you molested while you were students at Glendale Montessori School. In all likelihood you were never, ever molested, abused yes, if one considers the misapplication of therapy as abuse.

In the Glendale case, those professionals in law enforcement, mental health, social services etc. made a rush to judgment based upon, oddly enough, their professional lack of trust. They undoubtedly have seen or heard much too much in their professional lives not to accept even the most unlikely of acts perpetrated on a child. If this wasn’t true then why accept, the complaint at face value, if not for a bias against any injury deliberately done to children” If they did not accept the face value of the complaints, then who dropped the bam In other words, if they recognized that the child or parent might be wrong, that the complaint may be misdirected because the child knows the provider, then I would expect a thoroughly complete assessment, which obviously wasn’t done in the Glendale case. I am intentionally leaving out incompetence, ambition and greed as factors in this scenario but I find it less than forthright not to include the occasional, and I hope rare, professional who steps across the line and instead of practicing his or her profession “diligently,” does so obsessively and promotes the very acts the profession is designed to cure. That was the situation that first started the Glendale fiasco.

I have read transcripts of interviews between children and police investigators, and children and mental health workers – some with parents present. I find them all focused upon getting the child to admit through leading questions the answers to which there can be only one answer the “right” answer. Many if not all recorded interviews come, if at all, after hours, days, weeks, on some occasions, even months of unrecorded sessions.

I have also read reports on changes in the professional interviewing procedures to prevent leading the child to give an untrue answer. These reports, of recent vintage, tend to stress the idea that there will be fewer instances of false information because of the misuse of leading questions, anatomically correct dolls, many interviews over a long period of time, coercion­ “your friends told us the truth about. .. ” etc.

What Do You Think?

My advice is not to forget that the way the professional functions in the “workplace” also has extremes, allowing for the obsessive personality to obsess. All the changes in procedures will do is to give some instructions to factor in when choosing a place on the continuum of “Love and Fear”.

The choice is still the practitioner’s.

There is another layer in the food chain which, when genuine, plays an important part in the healing process of society. There are those members of society in need of help, in the legal sense, of getting compensation for almost every kind of damage that can be inflicted one upon the other. In the profession of law there are professionals who exhibit the finer aspects of legal representation and endeavor to play the game fairly, winning and losing cases according to the laws of the land and the skills of the practitioner. Sadly, we have a strong undercurrent of predatory practitioners, who focus upon winning at any price, and that makes for an “ugly” element whether in criminal or civil law — both of which Glendale had more than enough. These mal practitioners make lots of money and gain lots of recognition at the expense of others through underhanded practices, which seem to be not only common but also acceptable to a certain element of society.

Those lawyers who rushed to recruit the distraught members of Glendale in their time of greatest stress may have done an incredible disservice. They may have caused a bad situation to become chronic, by reinforcing the accusations of abuse handed down by their contemporaries in criminal law when in fact the students may only have been students of the school and not members named by those who were at the initiation of the fiasco.

I have tried to present, this ‘fringe’ scenario in a particular light to allow all concerned to re evaluate the circumstances in their past in the hope that there may be something to be done to alleviate any trauma arising from the stress of the school investigations. 1 refer to having the families feel secure that their children were not damaged at school, but, quite likely, picked up the emotional effects from the lawyer’s requirement that a professional therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist evaluate and pronounce their children emotionally distressed or abused – a requirement of the law in order to make claims in a courtroom. Of course the insurance company representing Glendale settled out of court, thus, not requiring a court appearance by the children, so maybe the damage was slight and has worn off by now. It is to be hoped that the children have grown up without knowing the stigma of having been “abused” at Glendale.

The Glendale children were placed in our charge to be taken care of and to be educated according to the principles of “The Montessori Method” designed by Dr. Maria Montessori. Some of those children were taken out of our care and placed in the hands of specialists, whose techniques were akin to, “putting a bull in a china shop” and waving a flag at it.

In other words they took a supposedly legitimate complaint elicited by a certified specialist and set upon the children with only one thought in their minds – to prove – not evaluate – but to prove the complaint to be true. I am sure there were specialists who examined a child and found no grounds for believing the hype put about by the police/HRS, and I’m sure there were many, I belatedly congratulate them for practicing their professions with due diligence and not being tempted into joining the rush to judgment sweeping the community at that time, I write ‘sweeping’ the community to give the sense that I had of a tsunami destroying or damaging everything in it’s path when in fact there were and still are former parents of the school who never believed the accusations from the start. They are good and steadfast supporters and have our undying gratitude.

One father, interviewed by police officer Detective Schwarz and HRS investigator Lynn Ayers was greeted when he walked into the room with, “Mr. Toward is being investigated for molesting children of the school and your son’s name came up,” He went home and asked his son if Mr. T. had touched him, When his son said, “No” he believed him and called me to tell me how the interviewers had shocked him and he thought I should know “what they were doing”, That boy will have grown up untainted by the insinuations of abuse circulating around Glendale because a father believed in his son, Equally important, they have their family’s integrity intact.

I wrote this narrative to tell you what they have done.

James H. Toward No, 990114

Florida Civil Commitment Center

13619 SE Hwy 70, Arcadia, FL 34266

There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.

CHARLES-LOUIS DE SECONDAT,

BARON DE MONTESQUIEU, 1742

Rabinowitz, Dorothy.

No crueler tyrannies: accusation, false witness, and other terrors of our times / Dorothy Rabinowitz,

p,cm,- (Wall Street journal book)

Garven, Sena, Wood, James M., Malpass, Roy S., and Shore III, John,  More Than Suggestion; the Effect of Interviewing Techniques from the McMartin PreSchool Case

References:

Ceci, Stephen J. and Bruck, Maggie (1995). Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.

deYoung, M. (2004). Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University. The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

deYoung, Mary (2007).  Two Decades After McMartin: A Follow-Up of 22 Convicted Day Care Employees.  Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 34, 9-33.

Freyd, Pamela, PhD, Executive Director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF).  Magazine.

Nathan, Debbie and Snedeker, Michael (1995). Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. New York, NY: BasicBooks.

Nathan, Debbie (1991). Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S.-Mexican Border. El Paso, Texas: Cinco Puntos Press.

Rabinowitz, Dorothy (2003). No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times. New York, NY: Wall Street Journal Books. Free Press.

Rosenthal, Robert, J.D. (2002). Suggestibility, reliability, and the legal process. Developmental Review, 22, pg. 334-369.

Wyatt, Joseph W., PhD., DABFE, Assessment of Child Sexual Abuse – Parts I & II

Garven, Sena, Wood, James M. and Malpass, Roy S., Allogations of Wrong Doing: the Effect of Reinforment on Children’s Mundane and Fantastic Claims.

Poole, Deborah Ann and Lindsay, Stephen, Childrens I witness Reports After Exposure from Misinformation from Parents; Central Michigan University and the University of Victoria.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: (For services rendered to a deranged society)

My family and I owe:

Kristen Erickson, our first Recanter and author, musical composer, and coreographer of the opera Recantata; her story of the Glendale ritual abuse fiasco; without whom, nothing would have occurred to attract and galvanize so many talented people to our cause.

Dr. Pamela Freyd, Executive Director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), our undying gratitude for her meticulous analysis of accusations against me, and for her tenacity in following the convoluted trail of the first “victims” to be coerced into becoming believers.

To our family friend and believer in my innocence, for the patience of a saint which is what it took to sort and order of legal paper work and get it to Dr. Freyd in reasonable time to show us the way to complete the puzzle of the origin of the Glendale fiasco.