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….
‘Cooper stopped far short of apologizing….’
Aug. 26, 2013
โAttorney General Roy Cooper stopped far short of apologizing to (Greg Taylor and Floyd Brown). He said that the SBI had better investigative practices now and that โIt was in the best interest of the state to settle these cases.โ
โAnd maybe in the best interest of justice, too?
โThese two men lost their youths thanks to agents of the SBI. That is an outrage for which they can never be adequately compensated. State officials have been encouraged to offer profuse apologies, and that is not unreasonable, though itโs a little late for it now….
โBut let no one involved in prosecuting these two men believe that the debt for their โmistakesโ is paid in full.โ
โ From โTwo former prisoners’ lives, valued,โ editorial in the News & Observer (Aug. 15, 2013)
As compensation for their flagrantly corrupted prosecution, Taylor received about $4.5 million from the state, Brown about $8 million. Attorney General Cooper seems to find such an outlay easier to swallow than offering an apology โ providing yet another example of the โMistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)โ approach to accountability.
By contrast, in 2007 the Duke lacrosse case moved Cooper to give the defendants a โstatement of innocenceโ and to at leastย brush up against remorse:
โIn the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly…. I think a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people.โ
But in 2009, after yet another wrongful conviction settlement โ this one for $3.9 million โ Cooper declined to give murder defendant Alan Gell a statement of innocence. ”The Duke case was a clear case, very unusual,” he explained. “There was no crime committed….โ
โNo crime committedโ? Why, I know another โclear case, very unusualโ thatย precisely meets that standard!
Good sense proved no match for gossip
Nov. 18, 2011
โGossip serves to fill up the vacuum of many people’s lives. It adds spice and excitement ….
โ สปI would never have imagined it,สผ say the neighborhood people. สปIt looked like such a nice, friendly, reputable school, and all the while we didn’t know what terrible things were going on in there. They sure were clever. They really kept it quiet for a long time.
โ สปWhen those kids came out, I never thought that they had just eaten feces, drunk urine and were beaten with whips.สผ โ
โ From “Sex Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited” by Richard A. Gardner (1991)
Kids say the darndest things… eventually
April 24, 2015
โAs was made clear repeatedly upon testimony by experts, the very first reports of the children were the ones that would be most critical in determining whether sexual abuse had indeed occurred. Yet in the first interviews, the children said almost nothing of any interest with regard to sexual abuse, and the police officer who conducted these hearingsย destroyed all of her notes and all of her tapesย of what happened before the case went to court. She was approached by several of the mothers initially because she had taken aย short course in investigating cases of child abuse.
โOfficer (Brenda) Toppin was crucial to the whole process because she was the one who escalated the case from a minor complaint by one parent into a case of massive sexual abuse of dozens of children by scores of day-care workers.โ
โ From โUnderstanding The Crucible: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documentsโ by Claudia Durst Johnson and Vernon Johnson (1998)
‘They saw themselves as the good guys….’
May 21, 2012
Lee Coleman, a Berkeley, Calif.,ย psychiatrist and co-author of โHas a Child Been Molested?โ (2000), served as a consultant to the Little Rascals defense.
โWhen I examined the terrible interviewing methods,โ he recalls, โit quickly became obvious that (Little Rascals) was like the McMartin and Kelly Michaels cases: a complete fabrication.โ
How does Dr. Coleman account for therapists’ and prosecutors’ โunwillingness to see what was in front of their facesโ?
โ[(McMartin therapist) Kee MacFarlane became a national figure by claiming to know how to talk to kids to help them describe abuse. There followed a cadre of young, bushy-tailed professionals who saw themselves as the good guys of a movement. They were glamorous and self-righteous, and they had nothing left to think with. What if a child hadn’t been molested? They never thought about it….
โThen they led meetings across the country, where they taught their system to others, who applied it locally…โ
Dr. Colemanโs characterization captures precisely the origin of the Little Rascals allegations, in whichย a seminar led by โsex ringsโ alarmist Ann Burgessย attracted prosecutor H.P. Williams, therapist Judy Abbott and police dispatcher Brenda Toppin.
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