The wave

McMartin was the most visible case but not the only one. Through the mid-to-late 1980s, a recurring pattern of day-care prosecutions emerged in small American and Canadian communities, generally following an initial accusation that expanded through interviewing of additional children to encompass dozens of allegations involving ritual elements. The Kern County, California cases beginning 1982; the Fells Acres preschool case in Massachusetts (1984–87), in which Gerald, Cheryl, and Violet Amirault were convicted and Gerald served until 2004; the Wenatchee, Washington cases of 1994–95, producing dozens of arrests and convictions later reversed; the Little Rascals Day Care case in Edenton, North Carolina (1989–95); the Country Walk case in Florida (1984–85); and dozens of smaller cases in similar shape.

A distinct category, frequently grouped with the day-care cases but better understood separately, is the 1993 West Memphis Three prosecution in Arkansas — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley convicted of the murder of three children in a case that combined small-community moral panic, recovered-memory-adjacent investigative practice, and prosecution emphasis on the defendants’ alleged occult interests. The three were released on Alford pleas in 2011 after sustained legal and forensic advocacy. The convictions, the post-conviction relief proceedings, and the eventual settlements are public court record; Damien Echols has published a memoir of the case, and Mara Leveritt’s Devil’s Knot (Atria, 2002) is the standard journalistic treatment.

The cases shared three features: prosecution in small communities, child testimony developed through interviewing techniques later shown unreliable, and ritual or occult framing of the alleged conduct. By the early 1990s the pattern was well enough established to be the subject of FBI institutional attention.