A week before Christmas in 1992, Buffalo police rounded up three suspects. They handcuffed a machine operator at Rich Products on Niagara Street, a chemist working his second job at a downtown hotel, and later a federal employee living near City Hall. ¶ The three were named in an appalling crime.
Two 8-year-old girls, twin daughters of the machine operator, said their father raped them on three occasions during the previous year – when they were 6 and 7 – and the other defendants joined in the assaults. ¶ The girls said they had been tied to mattresses or chairs, then violated as their mouths were sealed with duct tape. Afterward, life would go on as normal. ¶ Prosecutors could offer no scientific proof and only dubious physical evidence of rape and molestation. But they had the girls’ statements.
As the suspects fought the charges and rejected plea deals, prosecutors placed the sympathetic victims in front of the jury. The verdict: guilty on all counts. ¶ The years passed, and the three convicted sex offenders refused to back down. From prison cells they filed appeal after appeal. All were long shots. But the three insisted they were innocent. ¶ As it turns out, they were.
That’s not simply because appellate judges eventually agreed that the three had been poorly represented and deserved new trials. Nor is it because prosecutors never tried them again, nor because their indictments were sealed forever as the former inmates started new lives.
It’s because, as the twins now say, no crime occurred. They are now 30 years old and working in Buffalo’s health care field. In legal papers, both say the allegations were never true.
The women state that when they were compliant children, the officials leaped to the wrong conclusions, and county prosecutors coached them through false testimony. Through numerous pretrial rehearsals, they were rewarded when they did well and admonished when they didn’t.
“The prosecutors would tell us what to say,” the women say in one of their affidavits. When they tried to retract the claims, either no one would listen or they were told bad things would happen, they said. As children in an adult world, they could not stop the train rumbling toward convictions.
It’s common for lawyers on both sides to prepare their witnesses. But this case was a miscarriage of justice, said Michael Stachowski, a lawyer who argued one of the successful appeals in 2010. The defense team performed badly, he said, and prosecutors went too far.
In that era, sex crimes against children were exploding onto the national stage, and the public expected action. Rape, incest and child abuse ranked just behind murder in a survey of the most heinous crimes.
At the same time, the forensic interviewing of young victims was faulty and corruptible. An adult’s tone and expectations could, and did, taint the outcome. In California’s McMartin Preschool trials, the authorities led children to tell of satanic ritualistic abuse that never happened.
