The Enemy Within Page 32

  From its traditional farm-based economy and orthodox Puritan tone, Malden gradually evolved toward the medium-size, diversified city it is today. Its now nearly 60,000 residents are predominantly, though not exclusively, white, including many of 19th- and 20th-century immigrant stock. Most would qualify as middle- or working-class; only a few are truly affluent. Its spatial configuration is a checkerboard of quite distinct neighborhoods; typically, these are organized around small squares or parks. The housing stock ranges from numerous multifamily dwellings (“triple-deckers”), to occasional clusters of fine old Victorian homes, to some newly constructed redevelopment units. There are many local businesses scattered about and several factories. In spite of its fundamentally urban character, Malden likes to claim a “small-town feel.”

  It was amid this rather unremarkable environment that the Fells Acres Day School was founded (1964), when Violet Amirault—then a recently divorced mother of three, eager to escape welfare—decided to open a care center for local toddlers in the basement of her home. From there the school expanded and flourished impressively, moving in short order to its own space and acquiring a strongly positive reputation among hundreds of grateful families. Through almost two decades not a single serious complaint was brought against it.

  As Violet’s children grew to adulthood, the school itself became a family operation, with daughter Cheryl coming on as a teacher and Gerald serving as a kind of handyman-assistant. In due course, Gerald’s wife, Patti, also joined in. By now Fells Acres was serving some 70 pupils, with a staff of around 10 and Violet acting as principal. When Cheryl married in 1983, the entire school was invited to the wedding, and the pews of the Immaculate Conception Church were packed with wide-eyed children eager to support a favorite teacher. The start of the “abuse” investigation was barely a year away.

  Gerald’s trial begins on April 29, 1986, in Middlesex County Court, with Judge Elizabeth Dolan presiding. From the outset there are some highly unusual arrangements. The Fells Acres children are seated, as a group, on small chairs down in front, with their parents just behind; this means the defendant is out of their line of sight. (One child will testify only by videotape; apparently he is too frightened to be there in person.) The judge removes her official robes, leaves the bench, and sits beside the children.

  The prosecution outlines its case and opens the questioning. The children answer in a mostly halting tone; jury and spectators alike strain to hear. Some begin by denying any knowledge of abuse. When that happens, the prosecutors are allowed to reframe, and re-ask, the same question. And sooner or later, they get what they are looking for.

  The children’s testimony has been carefully rehearsed (as they readily acknowledge). On the whole, it follows the pattern of their many previous interviews with therapists and others—sprawling across a broad range, but returning frequently to the “secret room” (also called the “magic room”) and the various sex acts allegedly performed there. The latter include: masturbation, fellatio, anal and vaginal intercourse, plus frequent picture taking in the nude. The prosecutors have struggled from the start to discover a motive behind the crimes at the school. And now they feel they have one: the production, and sale, of child pornography. Thus they make much of cameras and film seized on school property. (When examined closely, however, the photographic subjects seem innocent enough: birthday parties, classroom games, swimming lessons, nothing more.) In addition, they offer graphic descriptions of worldwide “rings” devoted to “kiddie porn.” (But none of these can be linked, even remotely, to Fells Acres.)

  There is some physical evidence as well—or so the prosecution contends. A pediatrician is called to testify about small signs of hymenal scarring and vaginitis in two or three of the little girls involved. The defense counters that such conditions are relatively common in children, for all sorts of reasons having nothing to do with abuse (soaps, minor infections, even tight-fitting clothes).

  Meanwhile, 17 former staff members offer testimony on behalf of the accused. They know of no school space that could conceivably have served as a “secret room.” (Nor could the children ever identify—or the police ever discover—any such area.) They saw none of the usual indicators of abusive treatment (bruises, lacerations, emotional stress). Moreover, the school was an open setting, with parents, deliverymen, and others coming and going on a frequent basis; how, then, could so much criminal activity have remained entirely unobserved?

  On July 8, the case goes to the jury. Eleven days later, after 64 hours of actual deliberation—the longest such time period in Massachusetts trial history—the jury returns a verdict: guilty on all counts. A month later, Judge Dolan pronounces sentence: Gerald must serve 30 to 40 years in prison.

  The prosecution turns next to Violet and Cheryl, who will be tried together. Their case begins on June 1 of the following year, with Judge Paul Sullivan presiding. Once again the children are seated so as not to face the accused. Their testimony covers by-now familiar ground: the “secret room,” coercive sex, nude photography. As before, some of it strains the limits of credulity. One child was hung upside down and made to eat white pills. Another was sodomized by Violet with a 12-inch butcher knife (but apparently emerged without injury). A third watched Cheryl cut the leg off a squirrel. A fourth was undressed and tied to a tree—at midmorning, in front of the school, and facing a busy street. A fifth was accosted by a robot, which twirled her around and bit her on the arm. A baby was murdered, a dog was butchered (with its blood buried in a sandbox), bears and elephants and raccoons wandered by. As with Gerald’s trial, the prosecution—and the press coverage as well—tends to ignore these more fantastic elements.

  Once again, teachers, teachers’ aides, and school visitors are called as defense witnesses. And once again, they report having seen nothing at all untoward. But it makes no difference; the children’s testimony easily trumps theirs. The trial lasts 11 days. And this time the jury deliberates for only a few hours. Violet and Cheryl are, like Gerald, convicted on all counts. Their sentences are identical but somewhat less than his: imprisonment for 8 to 20 years.

  With the second trial ended, the Fells Acres case moves into a less focused, more protracted phase. The scope of public interest widens considerably as events in the Middlesex courtroom are joined to a “crisis” of national proportions. The final, inconclusive result of the McMartin case in California gives at least some cause for reflection and reconsideration. In this shifting context, the Middlesex district attorney’s office reaches an important decision. Even though other teachers besides the three Amiraults have been accused, charges will not be brought against them.

  In the meantime, Violet and Cheryl go off to prison. The years to follow will bring a steady stream of appeals, motions for a new trial, and other efforts on their behalf. It is, however, very slow going. In 1992, their parole request is turned down because they refuse demands to acknowledge guilt. In 1995, a judge new to the case, Robert A. Barton, accepts their motion for retrial and releases them on bail. (A similar motion by Gerald, in a different court, is rejected.) Further legal maneuvers lead, finally, to an extended hearing before the state’s Supreme Judicial Court (1997).

  But this court revokes the previous retrial order, meaning both women will have to return to jail. Chief Justice Charles Fried writes the opinion for a not quite unanimous majority. (One judge stands apart and produces a long, impassioned dissent.) According to Fried, there were indeed questionable aspects to the prior legal proceedings, including some encroachment on constitutional rights. Nonetheless “the community‘s interest in finality” overrides all other considerations. “The mere fact that if the process were redone, there might be a different outcome, or that some lingering doubt about the first outcome may remain, cannot be a sufficient reason to reopen what society has a right to consider closed.”

  That same summer, Violet is diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer; she will die in September. Cheryl, still temporarily free on bail, looks after her; Gerald is allow
ed to leave prison, in shackles, for a single, brief farewell. Meanwhile, defense lawyers renew their efforts—and the momentum begins to shift slowly in their direction. Judge Barton recuses himself from further participation, saying he can no longer be “fair and impartial” given his personal belief that the accused “did not receive a fair trial, and justice was not done.” In June 1998, his replacement, Judge Isaac Borenstein, grants Cheryl a retrial under very different ground rules, noting “serious, overwhelming errors” in the earlier proceedings. But this, too, will be reversed on appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court. Finally, in October 1999, Cheryl’s lawyers strike a deal with the district attorney that revises her sentence to time served and sets a number of highly restrictive conditions for her release; apparently, it is the best she can hope for.

  Gerald will have to wait several years more for a similar opportunity. In 2001, the state’s parole board votes unanimously in his favor, but then-governor Jane Swift turns down its recommendation. In October 2003, his renewed application for parole is granted. Yet he remains in jail while the district attorney determines whether or not to commit him to an institution as a “sexually dangerous person.” That decision will, at long last, be made in his favor; on April 30, 2004, he goes home on parole. Even so, he is given official classification as a Level Three (that is, extremely serious) sex offender—a stigma he will carry, presumably, for the rest of his life.

  As events in the courts veered to and fro, the press, the wider legal community, and professional psychologists began a series of linked debates about what had really happened (or not happened) at Fells Acres (and elsewhere). Both major Boston newspapers, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald American, supported the prosecution throughout—explicitly on their editorial pages, implicitly in their news coverage. Asked about this after her release, Cheryl answered simply, “What came out of the media lies was a jury that convicted me.” Eventually, to be sure, a counter-viewpoint appeared, first and foremost in the Wall Street Journal. There, a tenacious reporter named Dorothy Rabinowitz began a series of highly critical articles on Fells Acres. These would win her a Pulitzer Prize and lead to a powerfully written book entitled No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times.

  Lawyers and legal scholars also entered the building controversy. Hallway discussion turned into op-eds and articles in the trade journals, and then into full-dress professional conferences. The focus was courtroom procedure—where, time after time, serious “error” had appeared. To begin with, the physical arrangements were flawed: special chairs, judges leaving the bench, and so on. The shielding of child witnesses, however solicitous of their tender years, violated the basic constitutional right of every defendant to face an accuser. Moreover, indictments were unusually broad. And hearsay testimony was freely admitted. Judges declined to intervene when prosecutors engaged in suggestive or downright coercive questioning. Then there was Justice Fried’s extraordinary supreme court opinion, elevating “finality” over due process and the right to a fair trial. (In short: justice be damned?) One state official would subsequently call this “the most cold-blooded decision I have ever read.”

  Psychologists and psychiatrists had been involved right from the start. Some who claimed that status were, indeed, among the lead interviewers of the Day School children. Their own use of suggestive questioning would seem, in retrospect, utterly transparent. At first, and for some considerable time, they helped validate the prosecutors’ mantra that “children cannot lie” about abuse. But other psychologists worked hard to discredit this idea. The courts would eventually hear, from professionals describing carefully framed research, how “interviewer bias” might reshape a child’s understanding of objectively innocent events and thus “induce” a particular result.

  Finally, there was politics. Scott Harshbarger, the first of the hard-charging district attorneys, was a rising star in the Massachusetts Democratic Party. From his post in Middlesex County he would ascend to the office of state attorney general and then run a failed race for governor. Tom Reilly, his assistant and successor in Middlesex, would follow exactly the same path, from DA to AG to not-quite governor. Both used the Fells Acres case as a political stepping-stone. Both rose, then fell, along the changing curve of public attitudes toward it. And neither one ever expressed the slightest doubt, or regret, about participating in it. Three successive governors were pressed to intervene by offering pardons or paroles. All shied away, fearing the possible electoral consequences. Other careers were also affected—those of the key judges, for example. Fried remains a vaunted law school professor (Harvard), but his stature among jurists has been diminished. Barton and Borenstein, by contrast, have emerged as admired figures.

  Malden to Salem is barely a dozen miles. A half-hour’s drive today, or a morning’s cart-ride in the 17th century, might end at Gallows Hill. The distance between the 1692 witch-hunt in the one place, and the 1980s abuse case in the other, is not so far, either. Consider:

  Families, as well as individuals, lock together in bitter conflict.

  A panic atmosphere builds, with one suspicion leading rapidly to others.

  A sense of the demonic—literally so at Salem, figuratively so at Fells Acres—serves as the animating core.

  The judicial system is immediately, and fully, engaged. In each case there are “hanging judges” (albeit with the same literal/figurative distinction attached). Chief Justice Charles Fried seems a virtual “specter” of his notorious 17th-century predecessors, magistrate John Hathorne and Chief Judge William Stoughton.

  Intense, prolonged interrogation assumes central importance, with professionals in charge—ministers and magistrates at Salem, therapists and prosecutors at Fells Acres.

  Legal and moral precedents are tossed aside in the heat of the moment, with “the community’s interest” superseding justice.

  Victim testimony is a key point of controversy, especially “spectral” evidence at Salem, and “induced” charges at Fells Acres. In both cases, inherent evidentiary weakness will lead finally to retreat.

  Children are centrally positioned—somewhat older ones at Salem, somewhat younger at Fells Acres. They play a role that has, in effect, been assigned them by their elders.

  And there remains this question, also bridging the centuries, and cutting to the heart of both “tragedies.” By whom have the children been abused? Not by witches. Nor by pedophiles or pornographers. But rather—however unwittingly—by the adults around them. By those who would protect them. By their families, their parents, most of all.

  Epilogue

  Chelmsford, England, 1582. When Alice Glasscock was charged with practicing witchcraft, the indictment described her also as “a naughty woman.”

  Marchtal, Germany, 1623. When Ursula Götz was warned away from the village festival by her neighbors because of her supposed status as a witch, they pointedly called her “shitty.”

  New Haven, Connecticut, 1656. At the court where Elizabeth Godman was tried for bewitching her neighbor’s chickens, witnesses assailed her as “a malicious one.”

  Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. As Martha Carrier stood amidst a pack of howling girls, supposedly her victims, she heard herself denounced as “a very angry woman.”

  Time after time, these and other witch-hunt targets were charged not just with “entertaining Satan,” and not simply with bringing maleficent harm down on their peers, but also with a broad array of characterological and social failings. Here is a further sampling of the traits attributed to one or another accused witch: “spiteful,” “maliciously bent,” “of turbulent spirit”; “discontented,” “impatient,” “very intemperate”; “vile,” “terrible,” “evil”; “light woman,” “common harlot,” “bad neighbor,” “wicked creature.” Again, these descriptors spoke less of the formal matter of witchcraft and Satanism than of everyday bits of human experience. Taken together, they set a kind of negative template for entire cultures or historical eras; as such they clearly, and po
werfully, identified the enemy within the larger group. Moreover, a similar role and function could also be ascribed to the figurative witches of modern times—to the targets of political Red Scares and of day-care “abuse” investigations.

  But this enemy is—present tense from here on—not only a social creature, a subversive element poised to ravage community life. He or she also resides within each of the countless persons who fear, and hunt, witches—is, in short, integral to the individual self, to ego, to “I.” Moreover, just as communities occasionally seek to excise unwanted persons from within their midst, so, too, does the self strive to extrude troublesome aspects of its own structure. The latter may include sexual impulse (as in much of Catholic Europe during the craze period); aggression and the urge to attack (as with Puritan groups in early modern Anglo-America); or envy, greed, and guilt (depending on the given historical situation). They may also involve, at a much more immediate and mundane level, whatever is meant by “naughty,” “shitty,” “malicious,” “angry,” and so on. This is what clinicians call “projection,” and it infuses witch-hunting in the deepest possible way. Always and everywhere, the witch is the designated recipient of projection, the carrier, the symbol. He or she stands for—and, in a sense, is made to absorb—an unacknowledged “dark side” from the inner life of the hunters.

  On all counts, then, witch-hunting involves process more than any specific content. And it is, finally, this double sense of “within” that invests process with such extraordinary force: the individual and the group—the I as well as the we—on the hunt, in lethal combination.

  These last reflections may serve to underscore the ubiquity, the near universality of witch-hunting. Each and every one of the witch-hunts described here had a very particular location in time and space. No two were exactly alike; all must be approached as individually distinct events. Yet they bear as well a shared relation to the general, Euro-American, Judeo-Christian, “Western” tradition; none can be fully understood apart from that broadly influential baseline. Finally, they do embody tendencies that cross every frontier of time, place, and culture; hence they qualify, in effect, as part of the “human condition.”