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….
Could N&O have thwarted ‘prosecutor gone wild’?
March 18, 2013
“When I look back, I think my greatest mistake (was) my failure as editor of the News & Observer to make sure we had a top-notch investigative reporter on the Little Rascals case in Edenton.
“Our regional person was adequate as a regional correspondent, a full-time staffer, but he was not the person to see what was wrong with this case and to do the necessary digging to root it out.
“That prosecutor had gone wild, eaten up by ambition, I suppose, to hang these people, these people who operated the Little Rascals Day Care Center, no matter how.
“…All the kids talked about being borne through the air this way and that way and flying all over, and it was crazy stuff.
“As it turned out, (the Edenton Seven were eventually released), but it wrecked their lives forever. And I still feel sorry about that, still feel sorry about it.
“I think had we sent someone like Pat Stith down there, that would have been it.
“But see, at that time, Edenton already was a pretty far reach for the News & Observer…. (Our) pulling out of eastern North Carolina (to cut expenses) might have affected my thinking (about) whether we were really responsible for doing something about that miscarriage of justice.”
– From an interview with Claude Sitton, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer from 1968 to 1990 (Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Chapel Hill, July 12, 2007)
Move along, ‘Frontline,’ nothing to see here
June 12, 2013
“We received only one call, from a gentleman in Massachusetts, and he said he felt sorry for the whole community and wished us well. It was business as usual, except for all the damn reporters.
“I don’t see why this thing has to be tried again. It’s been through the judicial system, and I just don’t know what ‘Frontline’s’ agenda is.
“The town is not divided or in turmoil or any of that stuff they’re saying about it.”
– Edenton Town Manager Anne Marie Kelly (no relation to Bob Kelly), reacting to “Innocence Lost: The Verdict” (as quoted in “Sex-case documentary stirs up Edenton again,” News & Observer, July 22, 1993)
‘Parents too trusting’? No, magazine too gullible
May 1, 2013
“For several years… during which innocent people, many of whom were themselves the parents of young children, were sent to prison, the press by and large went along. ‘The horrors may only have started with sodomy, rape, oral copulation, and fondling,’ Newsweek confidently reported of the McMartin allegations in April 1984….
“Time’s account noted that a horse was slaughtered in front of the toddlers to intimidate them into silence, but the magazine neglected to ask how this messy procedure was accomplished without detection in a busy preschool in the middle of town, where parents and teachers came and went throughout the day. ‘Parents,’ Time chided, ‘were too trusting, assuming that separation anxiety was the reason their children cried when dropped off at school.”
“By the late ’80s, then, the notion that many, many day care workers went into the field only to sate their Sadean lusts for small children, and that schools were places fraught with sexual ‘stranger danger,’ and that childish innocence was under unprecedented assault from the forces of evil, had sufficient credibility to darken the nightmares of mothers and fathers across the country.”
– From “Against Innocence: The truth about child abuse and the truth about children” by Margaret Talbot in The New Republic (March 15, 1999)
“By the late ’80s…” indeed – exactly when the initial allegations were made in the Little Rascals case.
Constitution prohibits ‘punishment in limbo’
Feb. 22, 2012
“(Even as) prosecutors quietly dropped all charges against the remaining three defendants, (Nancy Lamb) had the temerity to hint that there was sufficient evidence to convict if the state were disposed to go to trial.
“This kind of talk betrays the same imperious mentality that has left (Robin Byrum, Shelley
Stone and Darlene Harris) turning in the wind for eight years.
“A person charged with a crime is entitled under our Constitution to a timely resolution… a chance either to pay his debt to society or get on with his life. There is no excuse for punishment in limbo.”
– Editorial in the Greensboro News & Record, Dec. 21, 1996