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….
For therapist, creating memory is easy task
June 13, 2012
“Actually, making a false memory is pretty easy.
“(Psychologist Elizabeth) Loftus describes a father convincing his daughter she’d gotten lost in a mall when she was five years old. At first, the daughter denied any memory of the event, but as the father provided more fake details – ‘Don’t you remember that I told you we would meet at the Tug Boat?’ – the daughter began to ‘remember’ and even provide details of her own. Eventually when her father said, ‘I was so scared,’ she responded, ‘Not as scared as I was!’…
“You can probably imagine the implications of false memory in the courtroom or on the therapist’s couch (which famously leads to the courtroom)….”
– From “How You Remember, How You Decide: Memory Part II”
by Garth Sundem in Psychology Today (October 6, 2010)
McMartin case brought emulation, not illumination
Nov. 2, 2012
“The (McMartin) episode and its conclusion were ravaged by the mass media and produced a tremendous repercussion throughout the nation – but not the one of caution, as one might have expected…. (Time magazine reported that) ‘Nationally, the attention generated by the case set off an explosion of reports claiming sexual abuse of children, increasing such reports from 6,000 in in 1976 to an estimated 350,000 in 1988.’”
– From “Witch-Children: From Salem Witch-Hunts to Modern Courtrooms” by Hans Sebald (1995)
When imaginary crime leads to real punishment
Aug. 20, 2015
“In the mid-1980s, a friend of mine testified on behalf of an elementary-school teacher who had been accused of being a pedophile.
“A child had told his mother that the teacher had taught them about ‘boobies and dicks’ and had drawn a picture on the blackboard that sounded suspiciously to the mother like an image of an ejaculating penis.
“The police had raced to the classroom and confiscated the damning evidence: several copies of ‘Moby-Dick.’ What the teacher had drawn was a whale and its spout.
“Looking back, we can see that the only boobies involved in this case were the adults. But whenever we are in the midst of a moral panic, as we were in the 1980s, we feel that our alarm is reasonable and that punitive solutions are appropriate.
“Dicks? That child knew the word ‘dicks’? Cancel sex ed! Run that teacher out of town!…”
– From “A Very Model Moral Panic” by Carol Tavris in the Wall Street Journal (Aug. 7)
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!