This is an L.A. Times Studios podcast.

The stories being told by the children of McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach were blood-curdling and bizarre.

They spoke of being sexually molested by staff and subjected to demonic rituals.

They spoke of trap doors, of secret chambers, of tunnels beneath the school.

Parents in the affluent South Bay City had entrusted their kids to the school

and the McMartin family that ran it for years.

Now, hundreds of kids described some form of abuse.

Some said they were sodomized, photographed naked, forced to watch animals slaughtered,

and threatened with death if they told anyone.

There were more kids coming forward and more evidence,

and it went from one lawyer to two lawyers from the prosecution

to three lawyers from the prosecution because it just

kept growing. It takes on a life of its own at that point. This is Glenn Stevens, one of the

LA prosecutors at the preliminary hearing in 1984. The heart of the prosecution's case was a series

of videotapes that captured the kids who ranged from four to ten years old, being interviewed by Children's Institute International, a Los Angeles therapy center.

The kids were given puppets and anatomically correct dolls to describe the alleged sex abuse they suffered.

I started watching the tapes in order of when we were going to start calling the

witnesses to the stand, because that would be the logical way to do it. What he saw

startled him. He realized that the kids' stories were growing more elaborate as the interviews

progressed. In the most simplistic and direct way, it would be, don't you want to be a brave boy?

The question would be, don't you want to be a brave boy, and tell us about what happened to you?

Yeah, but nothing happened to me.

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