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….
McMartin case brought emulation, not illumination
Nov. 2, 2012
“The (McMartin) episode and its conclusion were ravaged by the mass media and produced a tremendous repercussion throughout the nation – but not the one of caution, as one might have expected…. (Time magazine reported that) ‘Nationally, the attention generated by the case set off an explosion of reports claiming sexual abuse of children, increasing such reports from 6,000 in in 1976 to an estimated 350,000 in 1988.’”
– From “Witch-Children: From Salem Witch-Hunts to Modern Courtrooms” by Hans Sebald (1995)
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
Death noted: Little Rascals judge Marsh McLelland
April 13, 2015
D. Marsh McLelland, judge in the trials of Little Rascals defendants Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson, died last month in Burlington. He was 94.
This laudatory obituary in the Greensboro News & Record barely mentions the most consequential case in McLelland’s career – “He was brought out of retirement by the state’s chief justice to hear the Little Rascals Day Care child sex abuse case….” – and this one in the Burlington Times-News mentions it not at all.
Had McLelland stayed retired, the prosecution of the Edenton Seven might well have been derailed early on.
The judge originally assigned to the case, L. Bradford Tillery, stepped down under pressure from Deputy Attorney General Bill Hart. Mark Montgomery, Bob Kelly’s appellate attorney, explains why:
“Hart did not like the way Tillery was handling the case. The final straw was when Tillery ordered Hart to turn over the State’s interviews of those kids who were not the subject of indictments. He did not order them given to the defense, as he should have done, but Tillery was going to look through them himself. If he had, he would have seen that most of the kids at the day care, including Hart’s adoptive daughter, had said nothing happened and the jury would have heard about that.
“To prevent that, Hart filed motions accusing Tillery of being biased against the State. Rather than punishing Hart, Tillery took himself out of the case to avoid any appearance of partiality. Enter McLelland.
“Because Tillery had already ordered the interviews turned over to the court, that was a done deal. But McLelland never looked at them. I stumbled across them in the exhibit room of the courthouse and informed the Court of Appeals in my brief. The failure of the State to turn over to the defense the interviews of kids who said nothing happened was one of the grounds for a new trial for Bob.”
Tillery clearly was stung by Hart’s ploy: “I have served as a judge of Superior Court for over 20 years, and I never found it necessary to take such a step…. Neither have I ever been made to feel before that one side or the other considered me to be not only an adversary but also fair game …. for reckless assertions.”
If only Tillery had responded not by resigning but by sanctioning Hart for withholding evidence.
When Betsy Kelly was released from jail, much persecution still lay ahead
Oct. 9, 2016
Five days after her bond was reduced from $1.8 million to $400,000, Betsy Kelly is released from jail.
In January 1994 Kelly would accept a plea of “no contest” and a sentence of seven years in prison. Since she had already served two years and two weeks in jail, she became eligible for parole almost immediately. But Assistant Attorney General Bill Hart, angry over her unwavering insistence that she was innocent, reneged on a plea agreement not to contest her release, and the Parole Commission kept her imprisoned another 10 months.
The prosecution used excessive bail as a sledgehammer on the lives and freedom of Betsy Kelly and the other Little Rascals defendants:
- Bob Kelly, $1.5 million (later reduced to $200,000 – after his conviction was overturned – then $50,000 )
- Scott Privott, $1 million (reduced to $50,000)
- Shelley Stone, $375,000
- Dawn Wilson, $880,000 (reduced to $200,000)
- Robin Byrum, $500,000 (reduced to $200,000)
- Darlene Harris, $350,000
What outrageous conditions! Did Hart, H. P. Williams Jr. and Nancy Lamb fear that the defendants would flee to Argentina? That they would prowl the town’s playgrounds in search of new victims? No, these obviously out-of-reach amounts surely had no purpose but to coerce confessions. How shocked and disappointed prosecutors must have been that not one of the defendants, though crushed financially, succumbed.
