Oct. 26, 2012

“As in the McMartin case, the North Carolina ‘experts’ dismissed absurd elements of the children’s stories and fixated on the guilt of the caretakers.

“When a child put two dolls together, it counted as evidence; when he claimed that Miss Dawn cooked him in the microwave, he was taken to be speaking figuratively.”

– From “Day Care, Satanism and ‘Therapy’” by Alexander Cockburn in the Los Angeles Times (Sept. 5, 1991)

April 13, 2016

This week our recently installed Facebook page received a response from the father of one of Junior Chandler’s bus riders. He believes Junior was appropriately convicted and explains why.

Here is our exchange:

I believe Andrew Chandler Junior is guilty of all charges and should not be grouped along with those that you are requesting exoneration.

I was a resident of Madison County, NC in the 1970s and 80s. Not only did Junior transport young children from the day care he also transported handicapped clients from the Mountains of Madison Workshops Mars Hill, NC. My son William B Morris Jr.  (Billy) was one of these clients. Billy is a victim of Cerebral Palsy. We noticed a short time after Junior started transporting Billy, he started rubbing his penis when setting on the couch in our living room. His sister Kelly reported this to us. We also noticed he was not coming home at the usual time he had been when other drivers were bringing him home. Sometimes he was an hour or more late. On one occasion three hours late. The workshop was only 20 to 30 minutes away. After we complained to the transportation manager Junior said he was not going to transport Billy any longer because it was too far out of his way.

One day a neighbor was coming home from Mars Hill after shopping and found Billy crawling along Gabriel’s Creek Road about a mile from our home. I complained to the managers again and the only action taken was to change drivers. This was almost a year before Junior was accused of his crimes. I told the transportation management and notified Erwin Adams the county commissioner that I thought something was wrong about Junior.

Later after Junior was convicted I took Billy to Redmond’s Dam on the French Broad River below Marshall, NC where the crimes were committed, he freaked out and tried to get out of the car. He was terrified. I don’t know what he witnessed or what was done to him there because he couldn’t tell me but it had to have been bad.

William B Morris

Mr. Morris, thank you very much for your thoughtful response.

I can think of lots of reasons for a bus driver’s tardiness other than his pausing to commit “satanic ritual abuse” on his passengers…. All those times Junior Chandler was late, and no passenger or parents reported a larger problem?

After visiting the supposed crime site in Madison County, I found it even more inconceivable that Junior – as described in appellate attorney Mark Montgomery’s amended petition for writ of certiorari – “would drive off his route to a parking area next to the French Broad River, strip the clothes off the toddlers, troop the naked children down to the river, put them on a rowboat, proceed to insert various objects into their anuses and vaginas, bring them back to the bus, put their clothes back on and deliver them home.”

Although I see unexplained incidents and conflicting details, I don’t see anything approaching justification for a felony conviction – much less consecutive life sentences!…..

I’m reminded of a comment by a UNC Chapel Hill psychologist who testified against Bob Kelly in the Little Rascals Day Care trial…. He said about the fantastical, nonsensical testimony of the child-witnesses that “There’s so much smoke there, it’s hard to imagine there’s no fire”…. In that case, it has become inarguably clear that there was indeed no fire…. But the conclusions the psychologist drew from the smoke helped to send Bob Kelly to prison for six years….

If there is fire in the case against Junior Chandler, I’m just not able to recognize it…..

Even though we disagree about Junior’s innocence, I appreciate and share your interest in seeing that justice is done.

Dec. 16, 2011

Alan Rubenstein, who as district attorney refused to prosecute the Breezy Point case, is now a Bucks County Court judge.

Unlike H.P. Williams Jr., who was D.A. during the Little Rascals case, Rubenstein speaks freely about how he addressed claims of ritual abuse in a local day care.

“There was no more ambitious D.A. than me,” he recalls. “I reveled in the limelight….

“When we first got the allegations, I said to myself, ‘Satanic ritual abuse – I’ll be on the cover of Time magazine! I’ll prosecute it personally. I’ll get these bastards and put them away for life.”

But it didn’t take long for him to reverse course.

“Breezy Point was around the corner from me.  My own son had gone there. I just couldn’t see Doug Wiik in (prison) stripes… The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that nothing had happened there…

“I put our two best county detectives on the case, and I rode them like the Pony Express.”

The resulting 60-plus-page “Investigation into Breezy Point Day School” is a model of lucid, understated logic that blows to smithereens any notion of wrongdoing:

“We have determined that the allegations are unfounded and without merit…. No credible evidence exists to support them. In stark contrast, the evidence produced during the past 11 months indicates facts in direct, clear conflict with the charges leveled by the parents on behalf of their minor children.”

Here are three excerpts that convey the reach of the investigation:

• “In the opinion of this caseworker, ‘The child clearly exhibited the inability to distinguish what was true and what was not true.’ ”

Such insights seem to have been beyond the skills or preconceptions of caseworkers in Edenton.

• “The parents, when confronted with the clear discrepancy between the child’s description of the room and its actual physical layout, have contended that the owners of Breezy Point remodeled the room, removed the fireplace, put up plasterboard and added additional windows so as to change the character of this area to avoid detection. No evidence of remodeling was uncovered during this investigation.”

Passages such as this would be hilariously deadpan, were the subject not so weighty.

• “Bucks County detectives, acting upon (claims that the children were secretly transported to the Royce Hotel), traced all records from the teacher’s family credit cards, including American Express, MasterCard and Visa, to determine if any of these individuals charged rooms or lodging at the hotel. Ledger and registration books were also examined…. A check of these records proved entirely negative.”

In Bucks County no allegation was too bizarre to investigate. In Edenton no allegation was too bizarre to presume true.

April 8, 2013

“The panic over satanic ritual abuse in the United States… subsided rather abruptly, as panics usually do, whether they are individual or social. They are like an acute anxiety attack – absolutely absorbing while in course and then suddenly gone, leaving in their wake bewilderment, fear of confronting the causes of the panic, and bafflement about what just happened….

“But traces of its presence can be found without much difficulty in the child abuse and neglect (CAN) literature. The panic, and the way CAN personnel had contributed to it, made the field more self-reflective and self-questioning. CAN practitioners had been shocked by the spectacle of their colleagues battling one another in courtrooms… unable to distinguish between real events of abuse and mass hysteria over alleged satanic abuse.”

– From “Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children” by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (2012)

“More self-reflecting and self-questioning” may describe the current generation of child abuse professionals, but those who did such unspeakable damage in the 1980s and ’90s remain wedded to their junk science.