May 3, 2013

“In the quaint village of Edenton, where residents have suffered either a sadistic witch hunt of historical proportions or a rampage by a despicable gang of ritualistic child molesters, the public has been slapped in the face by a deal between prosecutors and Elizabeth Kelly.

“Kelly is one of seven people charged with sexually molesting children at the Little Rascals Day Care center. Her husband Bob is pulling 12 life sentences for his part, and lowly cook Dawn Wilson is pulling one life sentence. But Elizabeth Kelly will serve only a few more months because her lawyer got her a good deal.

“A deal? Either she is guilty of inflicting unspeakable horrors on babies or she is as innocent as a lamb. There are no degrees here, either they did it or they didn’t. If they did it, they all deserve to spend the rest of their miserable lives in prison. But if they didn’t do it – and the prosecution now seems unable to prove it and reluctant to try – then they all deserve to be free to exact legal revenge on a community that has put them through hell.

“There is no justice, no fairness and no answers in a deal that sets her free and leaves the others to rot in jail. If Elizabeth Kelly is set free by politicians, why should Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson be sent to jail by juries? If Mrs. Kelly gets a deal, then all of them deserve the same deal.”

– From “When justice becomes the slave of convenience, faith fades” by News & Observer columnist Dennis Rogers (Jan. 30, 1994)

Jan. 23, 2012

Last week I visited Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine to talk to Junior Chandler, who soon will have served 25 years on charges strikingly similar to those in the Little Rascals case.

Junior, now 54, may well be the last still-imprisoned victim of the ritual-abuse contagion that swept the nation’s day cares in the ’80s and early ’90s.

I’ll be updating his case soon.

In Junior’s former life in the mountain town of Revere, he told me, he was close to his parents, his wife and two boys, his two brothers.

Early on, he and his brothers helped their uncle grow tobacco and corn. Before driving a van for the Madison County Day Care Center, he had worked for the Forest Service, the Department of Transportation and Southern Railroad. At least one job he gave up because it interfered with his softball tournaments and night fishing.

In prison, visits from his family became less frequent, and eventually his wife filed for divorce. “Two life sentences,” Junior says. “She couldn’t wait, you know.” And his sons couldn’t keep watching him aging away in his prison grays.

When his father died in 1997, he attended the funeral in handcuffs. He worries about his mother, who recently suffered a stroke.

He sleeps in a bunk bed in a dorm with 33 other inmates. His assigned janitorial job is cleaning meal trays. For relaxation he plays volleyball and horseshoes, watches Westerns on TV, reads a little. His only write-up was a scuffle not long after he arrived. “It’s learning to walk away and how to carry yourself,” he says.

Of course I was touched by Junior’s deep sadness and resignation. Sometimes I find it too easy to minimize the emotional havoc wrought by incarceration of the guilty – just imagine what it must be like for the innocent.

Sept. 9, 2016

“Strange what we worry about when it comes to our children. A great deal of the culture-war politics of the 1980s consisted of theatrical wailing about threats to our children that were either entirely made up or wildly exaggerated: The boys in ‘Stranger Things’ love to play Dungeons & Dragons, and, in a rare oversight, the series does not even touch on the minor cultural panic surrounding that game in places such as small-town Indiana, where D&D’s supernatural elements sparked terrified tales of occult experimentation.

“It’s not for nothing that this came around the same time as the Salem-style mass hysteria over ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ at the nation’s child-care centers, with fanciful worries about Luciferian cults obscuring the more straightforward anxiety associated with abandoning one’s children to child-care facilities. Yesterday’s Satanic cultists and Alar [a controversial apple growth inhibitor] are today’s online predators and brain-scrambling vaccinations….”

– From “Familiar Things: The TV series ‘Stranger Things’ portrays family breakdown yesterday and today” by Kevin D. Williamson in National Review (Aug. 29)

…and clowns?

July 12, 2013

“Some professionals take the charges (of satanic ritual abuse) seriously. ‘It’s hard to believe, but so were the reports about Nazi atrocities,’ says Bennett Braun, director of the Dissociative Disorder Program at Chicago’s Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center. ‘Then we found the concentration camps.’

“Skeptics are still waiting for the equivalent to a concentration camp to be found. No investigation has ever turned up so much as a bloodstain that could be traced with certainty to these bizarre activities.

“What’s indisputable is the existence of a busy network of therapists specializing in SRA. ‘These allegations are produced by the unrelenting pressure of the therapist,’ says Richard Ofshe, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies cults and thought control. ‘You will eventually come up with bizarre stuff because you run out of all the ordinary stuff.’ ”

– From “Rush to Judgment” in Newsweek (April 19, 1993)

As Newsweek’s secondary headline noted, “America is now at war against child abuse. But some recent cases suggest we may be pushing too hard, too fast.” Among the prosecutions criticized was Little Rascals, but by this time both Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson had been convicted and imprisoned.

Unlike so many others who fomented the ritual abuse/repressed memory/multiple personality mania, psychiatrist Braun actually suffered consequences: He lost his medical license for two years and was among the defendants in a malpractice suit ultimately settled for $7.5 million. He now practices in Butte, Montana.