May 13, 2013

“On January 20, (1989, Audrey) Stever met with (social workers) David McCall and Grenda Costin, who told Ms. Stever that there was going to be an investigation into the day care. They also suggested to Ms. Stever that they put Kyle in therapy (and) that ‘they thought something was going on’ at the day care.

“On January 21, (Brenda) Toppin, Ms. Costin and Mr. McCall came to interview Kyle at his home. Ms. Stever prepared Kyle by telling him that he needed to be a ‘police helper’ to help figure out why the children at the day care were sad.”

– From brief for Bob Kelly before N.C. Court of Appeals (1994)

“As an initial social services investigator in the Robert Kelly case, I believe justice was served with this verdict…. A Salem-style witch-hunt did not occur, and a perpetrator of crimes against children was justly convicted. A significant battle in the war against child sexual abuse was fought and won in Edenton….”

–From “Crimes Against Children: A Guide to Child Protection for Parents and Professionals featuring the Little Rascals Day Care Sex Scandal” by David E. McCall (1995)

I asked McCall if he still believes justice was served in Little Rascals. “I stand on my original substantiation of abuse by Robert Kelly,” he said. “I was not involved in the investigation of the others charged.”

He said he went into the case with “significant training” in investigating abuse, adding that “If you ever want a child interviewed to find the truth, I really feel like I’m pretty good at that.”

McCall later left social work and now sells real estate in Edenton.

May 29, 2016

“ ‘On behalf of the State of North Carolina, I apologize to Mr. (Edward Charles) McInnis for the 27 years he had to spend behind bars for crimes he did not commit,’ McCrory said in a statement announcing the pardon. ‘While we cannot give him back those years of his life, I wish him well as he resumes his life as a free man.’ ”

– From “NC Gov. McCrory pardons Scotland County man” by Anne Blythe in the News & Observer (May 19) (text cache)

Another DNA exoneration – thanks yet again, North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission – and this time both District Attorney Kristy Newton and Gov. McCrory  acted expeditiously and humanely.

I look forward to seeing the governor extend such sentiments toward Junior Chandler, who has now spent more than 29 years behind bars.

Jan. 28, 2013

Manhattan Beach, California; Malden, Massachusetts; Christchurch, New Zealand; Maplewood, New Jersey; Sao Paulo, Brazil…. For more than a decade, unfounded allegations of day-care ritual abuse were breaking out all over the planet.

But for sheer cultural anomaly it’s hard to match the emergence of such a case in historic and pristine Edenton, North Carolina, not unreasonably billed as “the South’s Prettiest Small Town.”

Edenton had made lots of headlines before Little Rascals, but almost none since the 1700s.

Among the town’s prominent residents: Joseph Hewes, signer of the Declaration of Independence; Hugh Williamson, signer of the Constitution; James Iredell, George Washington’s youngest appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Penelope Barker hosted the Edenton Tea Party to protest British taxes (that’s her waterfront house in the opening scene of “Innocence Lost”).

Harriet Jacobs, author of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” was a native.

You won’t find a Walmart in Edenton (population 5,000 and slowly shrinking), but its trove of civic treasures includes a 1925 moviehouse, a 1939 baseball park and a 1767 courthouse (above right), the state’s oldest.

So why Edenton of all places? How did this charming, 300-year-old hamlet happen to offer all the essential ingredients for a world-class ritual-abuse panic? I wish I knew (and I wish Edenton did too).

Aug. 17, 2012

“I’ve wondered how the prosecutors (in ritual-abuse day-care cases) could live with themselves.

“Says Debbie Nathan (coauthor of “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt”): ‘There was a time – and it lasted eight or nine years – when there was an entire body of expert opinion that these things could happen.’ It was a time, she says, when pseudoscience had raced ahead of science, when best-selling books that had yet to be contradicted asserted that the inability to remember a trauma was the strongest proof of it, when doctors trying to be helpful established as a baseline a model virginal hymen so perfectly smooth and shaped that it allowed any actual hymen to be construed as traumatized.

“ ‘Our culture is still really atavistic,’ says Nathan, ‘but there’s an overlay of science on it. Mix the totally primeval stuff with science and you’ve got this mix that can’t be beat.’ Prosecutors, she says, ‘are just as naive as anyone else, but they also know how to sway people. They have all the techniques down pat. “Suffer the little children.” “Innocence defiled.” “Worse than murder.” ‘

“But why, as science and truth become clearer, is it so hard for so many prosecutors to recant?…  ‘Maybe it’s because the whole process of constructing one of these innocent people as a really demonically evil sexual pervert who sadistically violates lots of kids – the whole process of constructing this character on a real person is torture. You have to be very invasive. It’s a very sadistic enterprise. You become like a torturer.’ ”

– From “Why Can’t They Admit They Were Wrong?” by John Conroy
in the Chicago Reader (Aug. 1, 2003)