March 21, 2016

“Once again advocates of the much discredited Satanic Abuse Panic are making claims of widespread child abuse across Britain.

“Scotland appears to have become caught up in a nationwide frenzy of superstitious irrationality. This moral panic exhibits typical clichés of sensationalist psychology. In England, the case of Carole Myers/Felstead – whose family were falsely accused of an endless variety of insane criminal acts – has comprehensively demonstrated that the existence of Satanic Cults preying on vulnerable children is a myth created on the therapist’s couch…. Real victims of abuse are being let down by focusing on this nonsense.”

– From “Recent Satanic Abuse Claims in Scotland” by the British False Memory Society (March 10)

For whatever reason, the UK seems especially resistant to having its fingers pried from the myth of “satanic ritual abuse,” which migrated from the States in the late ’80s.

Jan. 2, 2013

What a bittersweet moment, reading Gov. Bev Perdue’s statement announcing her pardon of innocence for the Wilmington 10.

Surely, for the six surviving defendants, the pardon represents far too little justice, far too long delayed. But so many of Perdue’s words apply poignantly to a more recent “dark chapter in North Carolina’s history” – the prosecution of the Edenton Seven:

“I have decided to grant these pardons because the more facts I have learned… the more appalled I have become about the manner in which their convictions were obtained….

“This conduct (of prosecutor Jay Stroud) is disgraceful. It is utterly incompatible with basic notions of fairness and with every ideal that North Carolina holds dear. The legitimacy of our criminal justice system hinges on it operating in a fair and equitable manner…. That did not happen here. Instead, these convictions… represent an ugly stain on North Carolina’s criminal justice system….

“Justice demands that this stain finally be removed. The process in which this case was tried was fundamentally flawed….”

As noted previously, state government has continued to withhold exoneration from the Little Rascals defendants. In addition to these reasons that the Edenton Seven haven’t matched the Wilmington 10 in capturing the public eye, there is this notable difference in the two cases:

No one involved in prosecuting the Wilmington 10 remains in office, and the current Pender County district attorney has accepted Perdue’s decision without complaint. But two decades after prosecuting the Edenton Seven, Bill Hart and Nancy Lamb remain on the job, no doubt ready to beat down any hint of exoneration.

Sept. 28, 2012

As mentioned last week, the preponderance of women among the Edenton Seven was one of many curiosities that apparently failed to burden the prosecution with second thoughts.

Mary DeYoung addresses the issue in “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” (2004):

“By the 1980s… research studies consistently found that child sexual abuse by women was a statistical rarity….To accuse (female day-care workers of ritual abuse), child-savers had the daunting challenge of fashioning folk devils out of quite ordinary women engaged in traditional women’s work, and then persuading the public that evil had lurked unnoticed for so long behind such homely facades…..

“The answer was simple: belief trumps gender. Women who are satanists do what no other women even imagine….”

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?”