Oct. 17, 2012

“Little Rascals is a most important case, because it demonstrates how the mind set of interviewers can be transmitted to the children and persuade them to disclose events that never happened. A San Diego grand jury which investigated child abuse observed:

Of particular interest is the information received about the Little Rascals case in North Carolina. Eighty-five percent of the children received therapy with three therapists in the town; all of these children eventually reported satanic abuse. Fifteen percent of the children were treated by different therapists in a neighboring city; none of (these) children reported abuse of any kind after the same period of time in therapy.

“In effect, the Edenton (multiple victim, multiple offender) case was a real-life replication of the type of laboratory experiment that could never be done for ethical reasons:

• Select a town or city in any area of the U.S. or Canada.
• Take 90 children, and divide them into two equally sized test and control groups.
• Have the test group interrogated by therapists who believe in ritual abuse, using direct and repeated questions.
• Have the control group independently interrogated by therapists who are skeptical of ritual abuse using general questioning.
• Compare rates of disclosures of ritual abuse from the two groups. “

The probable result would be that close to 100% of the test group and about 0% of the control group would reveal ritual abuse.”

– From “Ritual abuse cases in day care centers” on ReligiousTolerance.org, (Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance)

Sept. 14, 2012

“Judith Steltzner Abbott of Camden has become a moving force for the well-being of sexually abused children and their families across the state. Her presentations on child sexual abuse have become a part of nursing programs and hospital emergency room staff training and have been presented to law enforcement agencies, social services systems and members of the judiciary.

“When litigation developed from allegations of child sexual abuse at a day care center in a nearby area, Abbott worked seven days a week to provide counseling, guidance and support for children and parents….”

– From Judy Abbott’s citation as winner of the 1992 Distinguished Women of North Carolina Award, Public Service category, sponsored by the North Carolina Council for Women

Not only did the prosecution’s lead therapist avoid penalty for misdiagnosing 17 Little Rascals children, but also she became “a moving  force…. across the state” in spreading her toxic mythology – and was honored for it!

Does the North Carolina Council for Women have a process for withdrawing its awards?

April 29, 2017

Robin Byrum, not long out of high school and pregnant with her first child, went to work at Little Rascals Day Care Center in September 1988. A year later she was in prison under $500,000 bond, charged with 23 counts of child sex abuse. Prosecutors had no credible evidence against her, but they were betting the youngest defendant would implicate Bob Kelly and the others accused.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she recalls today in her first interview since charges finally were dropped against her in 1996. “They thought I would tell on the others. That was the only reason I was swept up.”

Now 15 years into her second marriage, she lives in Eastern North Carolina. For her privacy I’m not mentioning her town or married name. “I’ve gone on with my life. It’s turned out well, in spite of all that….”

——-

After months of sporadic questioning she was arrested in January 1990.  “Three men from the SBI came to my mother’s house. It was so frightening. They intimidated me. One of them put his foot up on the table and I could see the gun in his ankle holster. He said, ‘I’d hate to see you taken away from that child.’

“Then we went to the police station in Edenton. [SBI agent] Kevin McGinnis said he would give me one more chance to talk. I could hear my baby crying in the next room. When I told him again I didn’t know anything, he was so angry he kicked the desk across the room.”

Along with Betsy Kelly and Dawn Wilson, she was put in a cell in women’s prison in Raleigh. “I was three hours from my only family in North Carolina. Strip-searched before and after every visit.

“They put another prisoner in there with us, a snitch, thinking she could get us to talk. But we had nothing to tell….. One day they even tossed our cell, looking for ‘satanic’ passages marked in our Bibles.”

As the months passed, prosecutors offered Byrum ever more tempting plea deals. In a particularly poignant moment in “Innocence Lost: The Plea” (1997) she explains to Ofra Bikel why she had even turned down a deal offering no active time, but an admission of guilt: “‘That would mean knowing I would not ever have to be separated from my child again. But then I’d have to live with the rest of my life that I [said I] did something when I didn’t do it.’”

In 1990, bond was reduced to a still absurd $200,000 and her grandparents and two aunts in Kentucky managed to pay in time to get her home for Christmas.

Today Byrum, 46, works in health information management. “My office manager knew about the case, but the doctors hadn’t put two and two together until they went to your site. One of them shook his head and said, ‘How did seven people go to prison on something completely unfounded?’ Well, I’m still baffled too….

“How could anyone believe all these things happened? We were a block from downtown, in a building with huge windows and no curtains. Parents walked their 2- and 3-year-olds there, and they dropped by all the time….

“Didn’t a light bulb ever once come on that made somebody use their common sense?”

Dec. 28, 2011

“Throughout the trial, prosecuting attorneys (in the Little Rascals case) repeatedly pursued their hunches without an apparent desire to test an alternate theory. This resulted in a rather spectacular false admission by 6-year-old Andy, who had been a 3-year-old at the time of the alleged sexual abuse by Bob Kelly.

“ ‘Prosecutor: Do you remember a time where you ever had to do anything to Mr. Bob’s hiney with your mouth?

“ ‘Andy: No, ma’am.

“ ‘Prosecutor: Do you remember telling Dr. Betty that one time you had to lick Mr. Bob’s hiney? Did that happen? Did you ever have to do that, that you didn’t want to do it?

“ ‘Andy: Yes, ma’am.’

“In reality, the prosecutor had made a mistake, thinking that the charge was that Andy had sodomized Bob Kelly, rather than the other way around. The state dropped this charge after it realized Andy had admitted to the wrong charge.

“This ought to have sensitized the prosecution to the very real dangers of pursuing a single hypothesis in the relentless manner we have described, but unfortunately it did not appear to have done so.”

– From “Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony”
by Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck (1995)