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 โ 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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Todayโs random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….
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Todayโs random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….
Sweden examines its mistakes โ why doesn’t N.C.?
Sept. 29, 2015
โThomas Quick was the name adopted by Swedish petty criminal and drug addictย Sture Bergwall, who under โrecovered memoryโ therapy, confessed to raping, killing and even eating more than 30 victims (during the 1970s and โ80s).
โThese were supposedly reenactments of โrecovered memories of sexual abuseโ he had experienced as a child.
โExtraordinarily compelling in the dock as a witness to his own โcrimesโ (which he had never committed), he was convicted of eight murders. He had trawled newspapers for unsolved killings and convinced the Swedish police that he was responsible โ even though he never led them to a single body.
โIn 2008, his โconfessionsโ were shown to be untrue and by 2013 the last of his convictions was overturned. The Swedish government has ordered an inquiry into this devastating failure of its justice system. There will be lessons in it for our own (British) authorities.โ
โ From โIs the therapy that brings out false memories behind VIP abuse claims?โ by Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mailย (Sept. 20)
How about that โ a government that wants to examine โthe devastating failure of its justice systemโ! If the State of North Carolina ever felt such an urge, I think I could come up with aย caseย orย twoย that meet that description….
How could anyone doubt ‘shoes made of baby skin’?
May 5, 2015
โIts members are, itโs claimed, drawn mainly from a school and church in Hampstead (a North London suburb). They are said to wear shoes made of baby skin, to dance with the skulls of dead babies and to sexually abuse young children. But the (satanic ritual) cult doesnโt exist. The claims are, according to a High Court Judge, โbaselessโ and those who have sought to perpetrate them are โevilโ….
โWhy, after a police inquiry and a family court judgment which unequivocally rubbished the notion of satanic abuse in Hampstead, are the allegations still proliferating on the Internet and being spread all over the world? We hear from the supposed cult members who have had their personal details and photographs published online and received death threats. And we ask about the welfare of the two children at the centre of it all who were coerced into fabricating the fantastical story….โ
โ From โThe Satanic Cult That Wasn’tโ by Melanie Abbott on BBC Radio (April 23)
This half hour of BBC coverage skillfully demolishes every iota of the Hampstead claims, but of course facts arenโt what engage the eagerly gullible. Since video of the 8- and 9-year-old siblings telling their concocted horror stories was uploaded onto YouTube, it has been watched more than 4 million times.
Expert on day-care panic adds papers to Duke Law archive
Jan. 11, 2019
The Little Rascals Day Care Case archive at Duke Law School is about to get some impressive company. Mary deYoung, perhaps the most prolific researcher and chronicler of the โsatanic ritual abuseโ era, has agreed to place her own voluminous papers at Duke.
The author of both โThe Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panicโ (2004) and โThe Ritual Abuse Controversy: An Annotated Bibliographyโ (2002), she is now emerita professor of sociology at Grand Valley State University. I asked Dr. deYoung to describe what she will be sending Dukeโs way….
โMy papers include 40 binders on American, European and Australasian cases. For many of the cases, I traveled to the site of the moral panic and collected local material that is not generally available by internet searches. I also have a file box of ephemera โ symptom lists, descriptions of rituals, etc. โ that were widely circulated at the endless training sessions that recruited so many social workers, police officers, medical and legal professionals to the idea that day care providers were engaged in a satanic conspiracy to abuse children. I have a few books, written by apologists, that probably should have been burned long ago, but they are testimony to the mainstreaming of these ridiculous ideas….
โThe prospect that lessons can be learned from this dark decade is very satisfying…. While day care centers are no longer the site of the panic, the ridiculous assertions, unfounded complaints and pseudoscience that resulted in so many miscarriages of justice still occur in recovered memory and other types of cases around the Western world.โ
A rare chance to watch the story unfold
May 9, 2013
CBS Correspondent Mike Wallace narrated this 1999 production that covers a number of the ritual abuse court cases, including Little Rascals.
(A more modern version of this video posted in 2013 may be available soon. In the meantime, click here.)
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