Rascals case in brief
In the beginning, in 1989, more than 90 children at the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, North Carolina, accused a total of 20 adults with 429 instances of sexual abuse over a three-year period. It may have all begun with one parent’s complaint about punishment given her child.
Among the alleged perpetrators: the sheriff and mayor. But prosecutors would charge only Robin Byrum, Darlene Harris, Elizabeth “Betsy” Kelly, Robert “Bob” Kelly, Willard Scott Privott, Shelley Stone and Dawn Wilson – the Edenton 7.
Along with sodomy and beatings, allegations included a baby killed with a handgun, a child being hung upside down from a tree and being set on fire and countless other fantastic incidents involving spaceships, hot air balloons, pirate ships and trained sharks.
By the time prosecutors dropped the last charges in 1997, Little Rascals had become North Carolina’s longest and most costly criminal trial. Prosecutors kept defendants jailed in hopes at least one would turn against their supposed co-conspirators. Remarkably, none did. Another shameful record: Five defendants had to wait longer to face their accusers in court than anyone else in North Carolina history.
Between 1991 and 1997, Ofra Bikel produced three extraordinary episodes on the Little Rascals case for the PBS series “Frontline.” Although “Innocence Lost” did not deter prosecutors, it exposed their tactics and fostered nationwide skepticism and dismay.
With each passing year, the absurdity of the Little Rascals charges has become more obvious. But no admission of error has ever come from prosecutors, police, interviewers or parents. This site is devoted to the issues raised by this case.
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Little Rascals Day Care Case
This Facebook page is an offshoot of littlerascalsdaycarecase.org, which addresses the wrongful prosecution of the Edenton Seven and other such victims.
Meanwhile in Edenton....
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Allies for our cause!
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The courts have a long history of capriciously pulling the rug out from under Junior's appeals, but maybe this time....
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Today’s random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….
Little Rascals: A ‘travesty of justice’ for the ages
June 20, 2012
“The Little Rascals case still remains the greatest travesty of justice I’ve ever been associated with or seen or even heard about… since like 1960.”
– Joe Cheshire, attorney for Bob and Betsy Kelly (Triangle Business Journal, 1998)
Maybe those day-care crimes just never happened?
Jan. 22, 2018
“Sex offenders have a relatively low rate of committing the same sex crime after being released from prison. Yet policymakers often base policies on rearrest rates or the fear that sex offenders are more likely than other convicted criminals to commit the same crime after release….”
– From “Justice Alito’s misleading claim about sex offender rearrests” by Michelle Ye Hee Lee in the Washington Post (June 21, 2017)
As far as I’ve been able to tell, not a single one of the defendants in the Little Rascals, McMartin, Fells Acres, Wee Care, etc., cases has been accused of later sexual offenses – or had been accused of earlier offenses. How could the serial perpetrators of such outrageous crimes possibly have avoided recidivism for a quarter-century?
If only reality had offered such vivid details….
Jan. 9, 2013
“One question that arises from studies on children’s suggestibility is whether they document false memories or merely false reports. Do children really believe that the fictional events happened? Or do they merely say so to please the interviewers?
“Consistent with the false memory interpretation, approximately one-third of the children in these studies continued to insist that particular events had really happened to them even after they were told those events were not real….
“Lacking any obvious motivation to lie, these children appeared to have developed false memories, perhaps confusing the products of their repeated attempts to visualize the events with the products of direct experience….
“Professionals were no better than chance at discriminating false from true reports. The credibility of a child’s account was related to the amount of perceptual detail mentioned in the child’s narrative. The more details, the more professional tended to believe the narrative, regardless of whether it was true.”
– From “Remembering Trauma” by Richard J. McNally (2003)
To better understand how the Little Rascals therapists went so wildly astray, give that last paragraph a second reading. “Professionals were no better than chance at discriminating false from true reports” – and they were mesmerized by the “perceptual detail” in those tales of sharks and spaceships.
Injustice without amends: ‘We should be ashamed’
Aug. 4, 2015
“Some have drawn parallels between the Salem witch trials of 1692 and the false accusations of sexual abuse that sweptc America in the 1980s. The difference is this:
“Those falsely accused in Salem got public apologies from their accusers and reparations. No such luck for the dozens of day-care workers and others who were falsely accused and imprisoned in modern-day America.
“We should be ashamed.”
– From “How the daycare child abuse hysteria of the 1980s became a witch hunt,” a review of “We Believe the Children,” by Maura Casey in the Washington Post (July 31)
I’ll have more soon on Richard Beck’s important new addition to the “satanic ritual abuse” bookshelf.