March 9, 2012

“This (Breezy Point Day School) case sounds like the Windshield Pitting Epidemic….

“In the early 1950s, people in the Tacoma-Seattle area began to notice little pits in the windshields of their cars. Rumors started – Martians were landing, it was from nuclear fallout.

“Well, it turns out those pits were always there – they are in every windshield – but no one noticed them until there was anxiety about nuclear testing. For the first time, they were looking at their windshields instead of through them….

“Anxiety makes things take on a different meaning.”

– Mass hysteria specialist Gary Small, psychiatrist at UCLA School of
Medicine, quoted in Philadelphia magazine (April 1991)

Oct. 2, 2013

“…It’s understandable that this week’s conviction of former day-care center owner Robert Fulton Kelly Jr. in Farmville, N.C., is being hailed as a breakthrough…. The conviction  increases public awareness of child abuse, serves notice that children should be taken seriously when they show signs of abuse, and calls attention to improved methods of handling such prosecutions.

“Since another long and costly child abuse case at a California day-care center nearly a decade ago that ended less conclusively than the one in North Carolina, prosecutors have learned much. They have learned how to question children without prompting them, have developed better investigative methods, and have improved the coordination between different agencies.

“But that’s not enough. Parents need to be more alert to detecting possible child abuse and more careful about picking safe, responsible day care centers. Despite this week’s conviction… it would be wrong and unfair to conclude that many day-care workers are degenerates.”

– From “How to Guard Against Child Abuse” in the Deseret News of Salt Lake City (April 25 1992)

During the era of day-care ritual-abuse allegations, most newspaper editorials managed to maintain at least a modicum of skepticism. Not this one – unless you count the Deseret News’ acknowledging a modicum of doubt “that many day-care workers are degenerates.”

May 8, 2013

“We just had all kinds of rumors. Everybody in town was involved in it, with this one pointing fingers, that one pointing fingers. My telephone was ringing right steady….

“We really didn’t know what we had. I had a police officer who works as a secretary (Brenda Toppin) who deals with this type case, and she had right much training but nothing like she needed. So we had problems right from the start.”

– Edenton Police Chief Charles Harvey Williams, recalling for a North Carolina House committee how his 15-person department struggled to sort out allegations about the Little Rascals Day Care center (April 23, 1991)

Toppin has been variously described as a secretary and a dispatcher in Edenton’s 15-person police department – she may well have been both. Regardless, she seemed utterly unaware how far in over her head she was interviewing children about supposed ritual sex abuse.

Nov. 23, 2011

“Finally, after eight years, the Little Rascals case is over. We can consign to history what has to be the most bizarre and disturbing episode in the annals of North Carolina law…..

“Never has the state devoted such resources to wrecking lives with such flimsy evidence and unconscionable delays.

“As a case history of mass hysteria, the Edenton story will enrich textbooks for generations. As a cautionary tale of what can happen when otherwise sensible people come under the spell of self-styled victim advocates, one can only hope the memory of Little Rascals will help others stop the next case before it gets out of hand.

“The state’s most effective weapon… was not evidence, but time. By holding (defendants) behind bars month after month, the state managed to inflict enormous punishment… without having to prove a thing.

“As fiction, the Little Rascals story would have strained the combined imaginations of Charles Dickens and Stephen King. As news, it is a chilling example of a judicial system that was unchecked by common sense or common decency.”

– Editorial in the Greensboro News & Record, May 28, 1997

When Gladstone (or whoever) first posited that “Justice delayed is justice denied,” could he have envisioned such a calculated demonstration?