Betty Raidor, 81, died recently of complications from a heart attack at her Bakersfield, California, home. Raidor was part of one of the most bizarre legal proceedings in U.S. history.
After children at the McMartin Preschool accused her and others of committing rape, sodomy, animal sacrifice as part of satanic rituals, Raidor and six other defendants were charged with numerous counts of child molestation. Their pretrial hearing phase lasted an astounding 18 months — the longest ever for a criminal trial in the United States — before all charges against all but two of the defendants were dropped.
Although charges against Raymond Buckey and his mother, Virginia McMartin, went forward and Los Angeles County alone spent $13.5 million prosecuting the cases, ultimately not a single person was ever convicted from any charge stemming from the McMartin case.
It did however ruin many lives, including Raidor’s who was financially ruined by the cost of mounting a defense and who found herself to be a pariah in her community. The case also helped bring to national attention ultimately false claims of vast underground networks of Satanic cults.
Contacted by The Daily Breeze about Raidor’s death, Charles Buckey — Raymond Buckey’s father — lashed out against the wrongful prosecution of Raidor and others.
How can you put something like that behind you when you lost all your property and everything you have is gone? Can you imagine that happening to a person who is a grandmother? They lost everything they had. The media did everything in its power to find those people guilty. And there were a lot of people in Manhattan Beach who thought they were guilty.
Source:
McMartin defendant Betty Raidor dies. Josh Grossberg, The Daily Breeze, February 23, 2001.