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….
Surviving tape undercuts officer’s testimony
May 11, 2012
“One of the attorneys preparing the appeal brief for Mr. Kelly found a tape of an interview with a child that had been taped over with another interview, but retained the last five minutes. The attorney (described Brenda Toppin’s approach as) ‘not only suggestive, but coercive to the point of brutality. The child’s crying and pleas to stop are met only by Ms. Toppin’s promise to stop when the child said what she wanted to hear’….
“(This discovery) is especially shocking because Officer Toppin denied under oath that she was coercive, suggestive or leading in her interviews.”
– From “What I learned from the Edenton Little Rascals sex abuse trial” by
Moisy Shopper, M.D. (in the peer-reviewed journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2009)
Exoneree sees through prosecutors’ excuses: ‘I call BS’
June 30, 2016
“North Carolina’s district attorneys say a proposed rule that would require them to turn over evidence of innocence after a person is convicted is….”
Anyone familiar with the worst practices of DAs won’t be surprised at the rest of Martha Waggoner’s sentence:
“….unnecessary because prosecutors already believe it should be turned over at any point, including post-conviction.”
Chris Mumma of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, herself punished for exposing wrongful prosecutions, wondered why DAs would object to putting their high standard in writing: “If all the rule does is raise confidence in the process, then it’s beneficial.”
A more visceral response appeared on reporter Waggoner’s Facebook page – from exoneree Dwayne Dail:
“If it is unnecessary and they already believe that there is a rule that holds them to that standard, then why haven’t they been doing it?! Why have they argued that they had no obligation to do this? Why wasn’t I told that there was an alternative suspect in MY case, who just so happened to be the true perp? Why did I only find out after years of investigation during my civil suits, after my exoneration, that the actual perp’s name was in their files but was never investigated? I call BS.”
Dail was convicted of raping a 12-year-old Goldsboro girl in 1987. DNA evidence cleared him in 2007.
The reign of fantasy as therapy, recalled in a single chart
May 3, 2014
As I’ve noted before, the Google Ngram Viewer mines a database of more than 5 million books to track word and phrase frequencies over time.
Too bad it abruptly ends at 2008, but the graph above still plots clearly the rise and fall of not only “(satanic) ritual abuse” but also two other examples of the 20th century’s most misguided ideas.
Let’s hope their decline continues uninterrupted.
Good sense proved no match for gossip
Nov. 18, 2011
“Gossip serves to fill up the vacuum of many people’s lives. It adds spice and excitement ….
“ ʻI would never have imagined it,ʼ say the neighborhood people. ʻIt looked like such a nice, friendly, reputable school, and all the while we didn’t know what terrible things were going on in there. They sure were clever. They really kept it quiet for a long time.
“ ʻWhen those kids came out, I never thought that they had just eaten feces, drunk urine and were beaten with whips.ʼ ”
– From “Sex Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited” by Richard A. Gardner (1991)