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 – 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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Little Rascals Day Care Case
This Facebook page is an offshoot of littlerascalsdaycarecase.org, which addresses the wrongful prosecution of the Edenton Seven and other such victims.
Meanwhile in Edenton....
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Allies for our cause!
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The courts have a long history of capriciously pulling the rug out from under Junior's appeals, but maybe this time....
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Today’s random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….
‘The right man’ was the wrong man? No way!
March 19, 2012
In “The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life” (2011), Robert Trivers briefly addresses the causes and costs of the ritual abuse mania.
I asked Trivers, professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers University, about the role played by prosecutors in such cases:
“Prosecutors are notoriously vulnerable to tunnel vision – i.e., once a suspect has been identified, others disappear from sight; they also need to justify themselves in retrospect.
“I was told by (Innocence Project cofounder Peter J.) Neufeld that even after incontrovertible DNA evidence, 75 percent of the original detectives who came up with (and helped convict) the wrong person still say they believe they got ‘the right man.’ ”
Honk if you believe that….
July 20, 2012
… Little Rascals parents were caught up in a frenzy of panic and misinformation.
… Ill-prepared therapists served prosecutors, not their patients.
… In their zeal for convictions, prosecutors behaved cruelly and unethically.
… 20th century North Carolina never saw a more sweeping injustice.
… Bob and Betsy Kelly, Dawn Wilson, Shelley Stone, Robin Byrum, Darlene Harris and Scott Privott deserve full and unequivocal exoneration.
‘We’ve learned a lot….’ (Too bad it took so long)
March 30, 2012
Kee MacFarlane is the notorious therapist who led the ritual abuse scare of the late 1980s (and pioneered the misuse of anatomically correct dolls in interviewing children). In just four months MacFarlane diagnosed more than 360 children at the McMartin Pre-School as abused.
In 2005 she declined to be interviewed by CNN but sent a statement:
“We’ve learned a lot in 20 years about how to interview children for forensic purposes and how to manage complex cases such as this one. It would be a sad commentary if we didn’t learn from such painful experience.”
Not much of a mea culpa – but still more than anyone connected with the Little Rascals prosecution has managed.
Officer Toppin sure had an eye for ‘red flags’
July 24, 2013
“(Edenton police officer Brenda) Toppin, who conducted the first interviews of children allegedly abused at the center, testified that ‘In the early interviews, I had very few children disclosing to me…. Most of the children were not telling me specifically about Mr. Bob.’
“ ‘Red flags,’ however, caused her to continue her questioning. The ‘red flags’ included children being tense when the subject of the day-care center was mentioned, she said, and not talking to her as normal children would.”
– From the Associated Press (December 4, 1991)
It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see Brenda Toppin’s persistence in the face of “very few children disclosing to me” or her overreaction to those absurdly vague “red flags.”
A surviving fragment of tape laid out even more saliently her abusive interview technique. Read for yourself a transcript of one of Toppin’s interviews with a child. The transcript entered the court record during the appeals process.