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….
Ex-D.A. ‘not in a position to talk about it’
Dec. 7, 2011
H. P. Williams Jr. was district attorney during the Little Rascals trial. He now practicesย criminal defense law in Elizabeth City.
I called to ask whether he had changed his mind about the guilt of the Edenton Seven.
โI’m not in a position to talk about it,โ he said.
Why is that? I asked.
โIt’s just not a question I choose to answer.โ
As I made another stab at continuing the conversation, he ended it: โHave a good day. Goodbye.โ
Williams was 39 when the first charges were filed. Today he is in his early 60s. I held out hope that over the years he had reexamined his role in crushing the lives of seven innocent citizens, had suffered a few dark nights of the soul, had harbored an unspoken wish to make amends, had summoned the honesty and courage to break with the prosecutors’ code of silence when faced with the error of their convictions….
I was naive.
A national epidemic of supposed ‘remembering’
Aug. 30, 2013
โThe Edenton case is not just a horrifying aberration. Adults across the country are suddenly โrememberingโ that they were abused as children, and filing civil lawsuits and criminal charges against aged parents…
โClaims of long-ago child abuse, โblocked outโ from memory until now, have become a common defense tactic. Unscrupulous โtherapistsโ and sensationalist writers feed the frenzy.
โAnything goes against accused abusers, especially the right to a fair trial.โ
โ From an editorial in the Arkansas Times (Aug. 5, 1993)
Courts reluctantly turn to Little Rascals DA
May 27, 2014
โThe state court system says it hired a local defense attorney to prosecute three murder suspects because the current district attorney had conflicts of interest in all three cases and no other prosecutors were available.
โThe N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts hired H. P. Williams Jr. as a special prosecutor on March 27 after attempts to find a prosecutor from either the state Attorney Generalโs Office or another district attorneyโs office failed….โ
โ From โWilliams to prosecute 2 more murder casesโ by William F. West in The (paywalled) Daily Advance (May 24)
Yes, thatโs the same H.P. Williams Jr. who as district attorney prosecuted the Edenton Seven, who as an ostensible expert appeared atย conferences on โsatanic ritual abuseโย alongside โcult copโย Robert J. Simandlย and Civia Tamarkin ofย Believe the Children, who as a candidate for reelection received onlyย 41 percent of the voteย and who after returning to private practiceย emphatically declined to discuss the Little Rascals case.
Yes, that H.P. Williams Jr….
UNC sociologist sought to deflate moral panic
March 6, 2013
Anthony โTonyโ Oberschall, professor (now emeritus) of sociology at UNC Chapel Hill, wrote extensively โ if not prominently โ about the insanity of the Little Rascals case. How was Oberschall able to resist the storyline that seduced so many others?
โBefore retiring from UNC in 2005,โ he recalls, โI taught in universities for 40 years. One of my fields of writing and research concerned collective behavior โ collective myths, false beliefs, rumors, how they originate and why they are believed.
โAs the Little Rascals prosecution unfolded right before my eyes (actually, as reported in the News & Observer), it became obvious to me that this was but one more instance of moral panic, false beliefs and miscarriage of justice….โ
Oberschall likens the prosecution narrative to โthe widely believed Iraqi WMD story disseminated by the Bush administration in 2002. Unthinking acceptance of what the authorities are asserting, alas, happens all too often.โ
In early 1993, Oberschall sent the N&O both anย op-ed columnย andย a responseย to a Dennis Rogers column, but neither appeared nor drew a response from the paper. (They have now been posted on theย Bookshelf of Case Materialsย on this site.)
โAt that point,โ he says, โhaving been stonewalled, I decided to research Little Rascals in depth and wrote several times about it in scholarly publications in subsequent years.โ
More about Oberschallโs research in Thursdayโs post.
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