The Nightmare That Lingers : Law: Four people wrongly accused 11 years ago of child molestation have won a $7.3-million settlement. But the pain the allegations caused has not gone away.

The pain and the tears welled up in Helen O’Keefe when she thought of what it had been like all these years--the good name lost and the fight to get it back. The court battles, one after another, for her and her husband, Tim.

And for their onetime neighbors, Jose Valentin and Myrna Malave, as well.

Eleven years ago, a group of young children on Planter Street in Pico Rivera accused the four adults of sexual molestation, relating tales of “dancing knives” and baby killings. All the accused were marched off in handcuffs by sheriff’s deputies as their neighbors watched.

They were subjected to the sneering curses and threats that convicts reserve for child molesters, the lowest of the low in jailhouse hierarchies. Old friends wondered aloud if they had really done it. To this day, Valentin will not take his grandchildren out alone for fear of a knowing look from someone who recognizes him.

Although the original charges were quickly dismissed as bogus, none of the accused have ever returned to the two small homes on Planter where they lived for so many years.

“No matter how many years go by, it doesn’t get any better,” Helen O’Keefe said. “The stigma is still there.”

Last week was a victory of sorts for all four. A jury in Norwalk said they deserved to receive a settlement totaling $7.3 million from Los Angeles County for what they have endured, the pain of having their reputations soiled, perhaps beyond repair. One juror said she found it bizarre that even after all these years, two children who once lived on Planter still testified that they had taken part in satanic rituals long ago.

But now comes the wait, the one to see if they must undergo yet another round of courtroom appeals before the long journey can be finished.

So how could this happen? How could Tim O’Keefe the law student and Helen O’Keefe the bank employee, Jose Valentin the bakery worker and Myrna Malave the nurse fall into this morass? It seems unlikely that any of this would have occurred were it not for the now-infamous McMartin child molestation case, which had splashed across the news for the first time only a month before the four Pico Rivera residents were arrested.

In that case, seven people were indicted on 115 counts of child molestation and conspiracy stemming from allegations at the family-run McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach. Suddenly molestation became a hot topic, a subject that was being discussed everywhere.

The McMartin case ended--six years and $15 million after it started--with a mistrial in the case of two defendants. Charges against the other five were dropped.

Tim O’Keefe calls it “riding the McMartin wave” that got them all arrested in the first place. He blames what happened, at least in part, for his not being able to pass his California Bar exam.

Malave says the ordeal is why she can no longer be a nurse and doesn’t like to leave her house. Interacting with people has become difficult, she said. “There’s always someone who’s going to doubt.”

It all began April 3, 1984--a Tuesday--when a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy responded to a call from a woman on Planter, according to an appellate brief in the case. The O’Keefes, Valentin and Malave lived on that street as well, but the two couples did not know each other.

According to the brief, the woman told the deputy that two of her children were acting strangely. Among other things, her 3-year-old son had been complaining that there were large spiders under his bed, making her suspect that he had been abused in some fashion. Further, her 8-year-old son told the deputy how, sometime earlier, he had been taken to a house down the street by a Latino teen-ager and locked in a closet.

Neither story set off alarm bells. The deputy said at the time that he was uncertain whether either boy was telling the truth.

But by Thursday, the neighborhood was in an uproar as word of more possible child molestations spread along the street. Deputies were called again to the street, this time because there were more than a dozen angry parents who had been told by their children that they, too, had been abused.

The swirl of activity was lost on the O’Keefes, Valentin and Malave. (The latter two were married but used different last names.) What they did not know was that their two houses were being pointed out by some of the children as the places where child molesters lived. Beginning the next day, a Friday, their lives would be changed inalterably.

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Helen O’Keefe was the first to be confronted. A 26-year-old real estate appraiser for Great Western Savings Bank, she had come home for lunch and to finish a report she had been working on. She knew the small house well because she had lived there since she was 3 years old.

There was a loud rapping at the door. When she opened it, she saw two sheriff’s deputies, one with his gun drawn, the other with a shotgun. One of the deputies pulled her outside and forced her to the ground.

“I felt like such a criminal,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ ”

Down the street, Valentin, then 48, was at home watching television when he heard a noise in the back yard. When he went to investigate, he saw a group of deputies with their guns drawn. Then there was a knock at the front door. More deputies. They told him he was being detained until a search warrant arrived. Three hours later, Valentin was led off in handcuffs.

“I wanted to die right there,” he said. “I was in a state of shock.”

Through it all, he said, no one told him why he was being arrested.

At the O’Keefe house, Helen was finally allowed to call her husband, who was working as a clerk in an Anaheim law firm while he attended law school. He rushed home, only to be arrested.

Malave, then 42, was not home either when the deputies arrived. She was visiting her daughter when a friend phoned to say that something very strange was going on at her house. There was a crowd of people and police cars out front. When she reached the house, she too was arrested. Valentin had already been taken away.

“I heard the words child abuse and right away said, ‘You’ve got the wrong house,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘There’s been a mistake. Child abuse to who?’ ”

*

The arrest of the two couples was all over the news. They were charged with 17 crimes, including conspiracy, child molesting, sodomy, oral copulation, kidnaping and false imprisonment. Their bail was set at $100,000 each. And inside the jail, Tim O’Keefe, also then 26, said he understood the true meaning of fear the first time he was marched to the shower.

“I had to strip and then walk down to the shower,” he said. “There was just a barrage. Every thing was thrown at me--food and urine. People were spitting at me.”

They were calling him “baby raper.”

For Helen, it was equally demeaning, feeling as if she were on display at the jail and sickened by her own stench after six days with no shower.

On the weekend after the O’Keefes were arrested, one of Helen’s sisters, Roseann Ruvolo, called their parents in New Mexico. The parents drove nonstop through the night to get to Los Angeles the next day. Each day after that, until the O’Keefes were released after 22 days, someone from the family was at the jail to make sure all was well. Valentin and Malave posted bail earlier and were released before the O’Keefes.

Ironically, relatives of defendants in the McMartin case often would be standing in line to visit at the jail as well. Ruvolo said they did not talk to them for fear of being associated with the more famous case.

Getting out of jail did not diminish the anguish of being treated badly. Valentin found himself a pariah at the bakery, a total outcast.

“People would swear at me. Someone spit on me,” he said. “I had to sit there and take it. A guy said under his breath, ‘I’ll kill the son of a bitch.’ When I’d sit down at a table in the cafeteria, everyone would get up and walk away.

“A petition was circulated to get rid of me. I worked nights, and people followed me into the parking lot after work. People asked me if I really did these things. It went on for a long time.”

When Tim O’Keefe returned to law school for the first time, one of his classmates--a man he had known since childhood--asked him if he had really done all those things. Tim said he exploded in front of the class.

“It was like going to the guillotine,” he said. “You know the press has already been there asking about me.”

*

For her part, Helen O’Keefe returned to work at the bank, but only after enduring an initial threat to take her job away until her innocence was proved. She takes pride in the fact that she has stayed with the bank and been promoted, through economic downsizing and her own problems.

Malave was supposed to start a new job the Monday after her arrest and lost it because she was in jail. She lost another job because of the time required in later civil suits. After several unsuccessful tries at a return to nursing, she is now on permanent disability.

“I don’t know if I could face a new job again,” she said, citing the stress of the work now.

In the wake of the arrest of the two couples, a talk show got into the act.

One of the children on Planter Street appeared on the Oprah Winfrey program for a segment on victims of satanic rituals. There, he talked of being coerced into witnessing animal sacrifices, drinking animal blood from walnut shells and being put into coffins. Almost in passing, he also said he had witnessed a Latino baby being murdered and baked in an oven. Winfrey, at least on the air, appeared to accept it all as gospel. In the course of the interview, the boy’s mother said the four people responsible had been arrested.

The criminal case against the four never made it to trial. Instead, it was dismissed only three months after the charges were filed.

Eight of the 11 children who made initial claims later admitted they had lied, according to a lawyer for the O’Keefes. Another of them recanted on the witness stand at the preliminary hearing. Whittier Municipal Judge Patricia Hofstetter, in dismissing the case, said inconsistencies in the children’s testimony led her to conclude that they were lying.

Peter Gwosdof, Helen O’Keefe’s lawyer, speculated last week that the children of Planter Street who eventually recanted may have initially merely wanted to get in on the act, to be a part of the excitement going on at the time.

In January, 1985, all four of the accused filed suit, charging false imprisonment, civil rights violations, defamation and the negligent infliction of emotional distress. But the weirdness of the case continued.

Nine months after the four were freed, parents began digging around the former grounds of a Norwalk church that had been razed to make way for the Century Freeway. The purpose of the search was to look for human and animal bones that were supposedly the remains of the satanic sacrifices children claimed to have witnessed. Nothing was ever found but chicken and beef bones that had been buried after church barbecues.

*

Meanwhile, the two couples pressed forward with their civil suit, which did not reach a courtroom until 1990. A Superior Court judge concluded that the four should be awarded $3.7 million in damages. The county appealed and a jury trial was ordered.

This most recent trial lasted six weeks. During it, one of the Planter Street children--now a teen-ager--took the stand and told essentially the same story that he had on the Oprah Winfrey show all those years ago. He declined to be interviewed, but said he stood by his testimony.

Another witness took the stand and said he had been molested 150 times by 15 different couples in the neighborhood when he was a child. He also said “dancing knives” would come up out of the floor of the church and that babies were baked and eaten.

Throughout both trials, sheriff’s deputies maintained that they did not act improperly when they arrested the two couples.

“It is still the feeling of the county counsel that the officers acted legally,” said Peter Glick, the lawyer for the county. He added that the options of what to do next are still being considered.

One juror, Helen McDowell, said the sentiment during deliberations was that the deputies did what they thought was right in light of a group of angry parents trying to protect their children. But they also felt that those arrested had suffered unjustly.

“There was an atmosphere at the moment (the deputies) were really caught up with,” McDowell said.

*

Another juror, Margarita Hernandez, said the jurors were also amazed at the testimony of the two witnesses who are now teen-agers.

“We just thought it was bizarre,” she said. “Most of us have children and they do not speak that way. We really thought the kids had a problem.”

So both couples wait to see what will happen next. Valentin and Malave were in the process of separating when they were arrested in 1984 and have since done so. None of the four will say where they now live, although all still live in Southern California.

All of the accused said last week that their lives had changed dramatically because of the arrests 11 years ago. They talk of headaches, anger, paranoia, insomnia and more.

Malave said the arrest and subsequent events made her a different person.

“I used to be outgoing. I was a happy-go-lucky person. I organized parties. I liked music and meeting people,” she said. “I was very social, and now I’m the exact opposite.

“I don’t visit anybody and I don’t go out much. I don’t go to social gatherings, especially anywhere I know there are going to be children. I know it’s wrong, but I’m afraid to touch them or hug them or say, ‘Oh, you’re so cute.’ So I just stay away.”