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….
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
Edenton Seven can’t wait forever for exoneration
Sept. 1, 2014
The recent deaths of Little Rascals figures Patricia Kephart Hart (obituary cached here) and C. Harvey Williams remind me that the clock is ticking on the defendants as well. (Patricia Kephart, mother of one of the potential child-witnesses, dated and later married Assistant Attorney General Bill Hart; Williams was Edenton police chief.)
Others who have since died include Kirk Osborn, appellate lawyer for Dawn Wilson, and Bradford Tillery, the judge originally assigned to the case.
Let’s hope that none of the Edenton Seven, still awaiting exoneration from the state, shares the fate of Connie Tindall of the Wilmington 10.
For maximum notoriety, avoid Chowan County
July 10, 2013
Although some consider Little Rascals the East Coast version of the McMartin case, according to Google’s nGram Viewer it comes in a distant second in prominence.
Not even eight hours of “Innocence Lost” could make up for McMartin’s having been tried first and for its having been situated in Southern California rather than in Eastern North Carolina.
Prosecutors claimed to see ‘coherent package’
July 11, 2012
“And what did Doctor (Mark) Everson say what to look for? A coherent package that’s consistent. You look at the behavior and what the child says…. He talked about sexual acting out, coaxing sexual behavior, masturbation, fears, and anxieties. New fears that come up that aren’t developmentally appropriate for a child that age, such as a fear of men or a particular man, changes in their personality caused by stress like regressive behavior, bed wetting, clinginess, thumb sucking.
“And as I name these, I hope that you are sitting there remembering how many of these children so far have had these kinds of behaviors.”
– From prosecutor Nancy Lamb’s closing argument in the trial of Bob Kelly
“… What could be expected for ritually abused children? That vexing question prompted everyone involved in the McMartin Preschool case to look for symptoms, and in their urgency, to mistake normal developmentally-based behaviors, quirky idiosyncrasies and even the iatrogenic effects of intimidating interviews for sequelae of ritual abuse. In this nascent moral panic, the widely circulated ‘symptom lists‘ transformed messy subjectivity into embodied and interpretable texts….”
– From “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” by Mary DeYoung (2004)
To day-care ritual-abuse prosecutors, what Nancy Lamb called “these kinds of behaviors” embraced everything from bed-wetting to hyperactivity to eating disorders. No dot went unconnected.
Contrary to such handy lists, however, numerous studies have found no “coherent package” of symptoms of child sexual abuse.