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….
Who remembers wrongful conviction was overturned?
March 3, 2016
“From the McMartin preschool trial in the United States in the ’80s … not one ‘satanic abuse’ network in the modern context has ever been proven to exist.
“Despite this fact people tend to remember the sensationalism of each case, and the fear and rumors generated by them. Not the final verdict, which has always been acquittal or at least the overturning of a wrongful conviction. The truth of each case gets lost in time….”
– From “Satanic Ritual Abuse: 7 Fictions That Created A Mythology” by Keelan Balderson at WideShut (March 8, 2015)
What might it feel like, all these years later, encountering people who vaguely remember your prosecution for “satanic ritual abuse” at Little Rascals – but not your exoneration?
Lessons from a Windshield Pitting Epidemic
March 9, 2012
“This (Breezy Point Day School) case sounds like the Windshield Pitting Epidemic….
“In the early 1950s, people in the Tacoma-Seattle area began to notice little pits in the windshields of their cars. Rumors started – Martians were landing, it was from nuclear fallout.
“Well, it turns out those pits were always there – they are in every windshield – but no one noticed them until there was anxiety about nuclear testing. For the first time, they were looking at their windshields instead of through them….
“Anxiety makes things take on a different meaning.”
– Mass hysteria specialist Gary Small, psychiatrist at UCLA School of
Medicine, quoted in Philadelphia magazine (April 1991)
It wasn’t just Edenton where lips were zipped
Sept. 5, 2015
“An 1895 reporter found (Salem) town residents reluctant to talk about the past.
“When they did, it was to impress upon him that they had not burned a single witch. Years later Arthur Miller met with the same silence while researching The Crucible. ‘You couldn’t get anyone to say anything about it,’ he complained of 1692….
“When (an archivist) began an excavation of the parsonage site in 1970, two elderly sisters waved fists at him from across the way…. ‘What are you bringing this up for?’ they demanded….”
– From “The Witches: Salem, 1692” by Stacy Schiff (due Oct. 27)
Schiff has a lengthy related piece in the current New Yorker.
A lack of reporters ‘sufficiently passionate to get at this story’?
July 8, 2016
“As for an ‘investigative’ piece about the Kelly case that would get to the ‘truth,’ we will have to see if we have any staff members who are sufficiently passionate to get at this story….”
– From News & Observer executive editor Frank Daniels III’s reply (June 10, 1992) to a plea for coverage from Jane W. Duffield of the Committee to Support the Edenton Seven
Daniels’ predecessor, Claude Sitton, lamented later that “my greatest mistake (was) my failure as editor… to make sure we had a top-notch investigative reporter on the Little Rascals case.”
I’ve asked Daniels to share his own recollections of the paper’s coverage, but haven’t heard back.