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….
Retraction won’t kill you, journal editors
June 7, 2013
“One hundred and fifty-five years after it snubbed Dr. John Snow in his obituary, The Lancet is taking it back.
“The British medical journal noted that its original obituary – published June 26, 1858 – failed to mention his “remarkable achievements” in epidemiology, especially his research on the way cholera is spread….
“It’s not the first time a publication has issued a correction for work published decades ago. The New York Times corrected a 26-year-old error about horse-drawn carriages in Central Park in 2011, and once retracted a 1920 editorial that claimed space travel was impossible.”
– From “The Lancet Corrects Obituary For John Snow Published 155 Years Ago” in the Huffington Post (April 12)
If The Lancet and The New York Times can reach back in their archives to right the record, why can’t Journal of Child and Youth Care, Child Abuse & Neglect and Nursing Research?
A mother to fear at your day-care door
June 6, 2012
“The Kellys decided to buy the day care center after a previous owner quit following a dispute with a mother (who) was upset that her son didn’t get cake at a party because he wouldn’t wear a bib, Mrs. Kelly said (in testimony at Bob Kelly’s trial).
– The Associated Press, Feb. 11, 1992
What a coincidence – Jane Mabry, the disgruntled mother who ran off the first day-care owner, is the very same disgruntled mother who shut down the Kellys!
The prosecution’s failures
Oct. 28, 2011
“If the defendants were guilty, the prosecution failed.
“If the defendants were innocent, the prosecution failed.
“The prosecution failed at everything but taking years from people’s lives, ruining their reputations, breaking up their marriages, dividing the people of a small town, wasting more than $1 million of the taxpayers’ money and smearing North Carolina’s reputation.”
– Editorial in the Wilmington Star-News, September 27, 1999
For child witnesses, life was changed forever
Jan. 4, 2017
“[Richard Beck’s ‘Believe the Children’] is perhaps most poignant on the subject of the damage to the young people who acted as witnesses. ‘Children as young as three and almost never older than nine or ten,’ Beck writes, ‘children who previously understood their time in day care as essentially normal, whether happy or not, had their lives reorganized around the idea that they were deeply and irrevocably traumatized.’ ”
– From “Our Panics, Ourselves” by Rebecca Onion in Boston Review (Sept. 22, 2015)
