They Must Be Monsters

It was somewhat delusional: the idea that we, two undergrads, would leave college to chase the mystery behind the McMartin Preschool case, a criminal proceeding that had steadily become the longest, costliest in United States history. It was the epitome of naiveté—but we were too green to see it.

Back then, in 1987, as we examined the case and the community of Manhattan Beach that gave it life, we saw an absence of blunt journalism; that a false narrative had spun tragically out of control. No one, it seemed, was ready to face up to what we’d done.

To the general public, the story was uniquely grotesque—a conspiracy of adults who’d sexually abused hundreds of preschool kids, as deplorable as any crime had ever been.

But if, as some argued, the case was a hoax, then it was an American tragedy of monumental proportion, where young children were being used and exploited as weapons to persecute innocent citizens, all of it orchestrated by the very people—parents, prosecutors, and clinical professionals—who’d so nobly claimed they were out to protect them.

From our perspective, it was not so much a story about “child molestation,” but a remarkable account of a community gone mad, a historical event that had been hopelessly misunderstood, and thus, misreported.

And so, for three years, we kept going, following one lead to the next, until the day we finally got our hands on the truth.

By doing so, it’s fair to say, we became experts on the events of Manhattan Beach, the two people uniquely qualified to write They Must Be Monsters.  It’s not because we took a course, or did an abundance of research, or sat through the trial—frankly, we did all of those things—but because we took it further than anyone else. We went there. We lived it.

Having sat on this information for nearly three decades, we’re ready to go on the record, to reconcile this forgotten calamity. We’re doing it for ourselves, for the people who suffered, and, most importantly, for our great society of fair-minded citizens who never knew that something so unjust had actually occurred in modern America.