McMartin Case Exams Show Sex Abuse, Doctor Testifies

A physician who examined more than 30 of the 42 children involved in the McMartin Pre-School molestation case testified Wednesday that she had found physical evidence of sexual abuse and assault in six of them. She has yet to testify about the others.

“The clinical evaluation was consistent with the history of sexual abuse,” said Dr. Astrid Heger, summarizing her findings on the first six children she has so far testified about in detail. The children range in age from 5 to 10; all were pupils at the Manhattan Beach nursery school.

Heger, who has examined at least 150 former McMartin students, is to continue testifying today in the combined preliminary hearing for the seven defendants in the case, all former McMartin teachers.

Heger is a pediatrician at County-USC Medical Center and a consultant to Children’s Institute International, a child-abuse diagnostic and treatment center, where many of the children were first interviewed.

Her testimony, together with that last month of Dr. Kerry English, a pediatrician and sexual-abuse expert at Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center, provided the first medical evidence of molestations.

The defense has contended that the children were brainwashed by therapists into believing that they had been molested.

However, Heger said she was able “to rule out to a medical certainty” that the genital and rectal injuries she found were caused by anything other than forced penetration by an object “the size and consistency” of a male sexual organ or, in other cases, a blunt object.

She said the shapes and patterns of scarring and the precise size and locations of the injuries are such that they would not have been caused by bowel problems, masturbation, the insertion of pencils or falling on sharp objects, such as a picket fence.

Scarring patterns, particularly in young children who are not yet sexually active, can provide evidence of years-old abuse, even in cases where there was outside force but no penetration, she said. She said that in some of the McMartin children she found evidence of “painful, forceful penetration” indicative of sexual assault, as well as abuse.

Heger said the injuries were visible to the naked eye and were documented by use of a colposcope, a cameralike machine that takes magnified, three-dimensional photographs of external genital areas.

The pediatrician said her findings agreed with the children’s descriptions to her of being sodomized and raped repeatedly. No children have testified yet at the hearing, but Heger was allowed by the judge to state what they had told her when she took a medical history from them and their parents as part of her evaluation.

Although the preliminary hearing is in its sixth month, substantive testimony did not begin until last month. Lengthy legal arguments over such matters as whether the hearing should be closed to the public and how the children would testify occupied most of the time.

Prosecutors have avoided calling children to the stand in the hope that a bill permitting the use of closed-circuit television testimony will be passed by the Legislature in time to prevent their having to face the defendants, whom they reportedly fear and to whom they have ascribed magical powers.

Municipal Judge Aviva K. Bobb has ruled that they must testify in court but that the news media and public will be excluded. The proceedings will be broadcast to a room reserved for spectators.