Feb. 27, 2012

“One (change made by District Attorney Frank Parrish) was the assignment of Assistant District Attorney Nancy Lamb as ‘Chief Assistant District Attorney,’ making one of her duties ‘quality control’ and noting she will only continue to ‘try cases as necessary.’ ”

– From the Outer Banks Voice (Feb. 14, 2012)

“Quality control”? That’s hardly a gift that evinced itself in Lamb’s frenzied, hysterical prosecution of the Edenton Seven.

But her removal from the courtroom should be reassuring to innocent defendants throughout the First Judicial District.

June 25, 2012

“I saw this woman in her 20s … accused of something like 2,800 charges of child sex abuse. Oh, I thought, well, that’s very odd….

“I thought, How can (Kelly Michaels) one woman, one young, lone woman in an absolutely open place like the child care center of the church in New Jersey that she worked for – how could she have committed these enormous crimes against 20 children, dressed and undressed them and sent – you know what it is to dress and undress even one child every day without getting their socks lost? – 20 children in a perfectly public place, torture them for two years, frighten and terrorize them, and they never went home and told their parents anything?… This did seem strange.”

– Dorothy Rabinowitz, recalling on C-SPAN the 1985 case that led to her Pulitzer-winning coverage of the ritual-abuse day-care mania

“This did seem strange.”

From the vantage of 2012, of course, such allegations seem not only “strange” but also patently incredible.

So why didn’t everybody – therapists, journalists, prosecutors, jurors – share Rabinowitz’s reasonable doubt?

How did such a grotesque misconception flourish?

Had skepticism really fallen that far out of fashion during the “Believe the Children” zeitgeist?

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.

March 18, 2013

“When I look back, I think my greatest mistake (was) my failure as editor of the News & Observer to make sure we had a top-notch investigative reporter on the Little Rascals case in Edenton.

“Our regional person was adequate as a regional correspondent, a full-time staffer, but he was not the person to see what was wrong with this case and to do the necessary digging to root it out.

“That prosecutor had gone wild, eaten up by ambition, I suppose, to hang these people, these people who operated the Little Rascals Day Care Center, no matter how.

“…All the kids talked about being borne through the air this way and that way and flying all over, and it was crazy stuff.

“As it turned out, (the Edenton Seven were eventually released), but it wrecked their lives forever. And I still feel sorry about that, still feel sorry about it.

“I think had we sent someone like Pat Stith down there, that would have been it.

“But see, at that time, Edenton already was a pretty far reach for the News & Observer…. (Our) pulling out of eastern North Carolina (to cut expenses) might have affected my thinking (about) whether we were really responsible for doing something about that miscarriage of justice.”

– From an interview with Claude Sitton, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer from 1968 to 1990 (Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Chapel Hill, July 12, 2007)