March 13, 2013

In researching his master’s thesis, “Modern Witch Hunts: How Media Have Mishandled Ritual Child-Sex-Abuse Cases,” UNC Chapel Hill journalism student David O. Loomis focused on the inadequate coverage provided by the weekly Chowan Herald in Edenton.

“North Carolina law,” Loomis acknowledged, “prohibits official disclosure of information about ongoing criminal investigations. Under the circumstances, gathering information about questionable interrogations conducted in therapy sessions would be a difficult and complex undertaking for a small reporting staff on a tight budget….”

The comments he elicited from Jack D. Grove, former managing editor of the Herald, reflect the challenge stories such as Little Rascals present tiny newsrooms – and the severely limited guidance they are able to make available to readers in forming opinions:

On his journalistic experience: “I was never a professional reporter.”

On being almost three months behind the Elizabeth City Advance in starting to cover the story: “In a small town like Edenton, reputations are at stake. Reputations are everything in a small town.”

On relations with prosecutors and police: “The district attorney became our prime source…. I didn’t ask questions of the Police Department at all, because I knew what the answers were going to be…. I did ask Brenda Toppin, who I did not know was lead investigator, but I got an uncharacteristic cold shoulder. She said, ‘I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.’ That was interesting.”

On the newsroom budget: “I could only make long-distance calls when the boss would let me. He never refused. But he had to approve.”

 On outside pressure: “I was approached by several influential businessmen who clouded up and rained all over me for putting a (Little Rascals) story on the back page. I said, ‘Go tell Pete Manning (the publisher), don’t tell me.’ These businessmen, almost all parents of Little Rascals children, went into a closed-door meeting with Pete. We never again had a story anywhere but on the front page after that.”

Courtesy of David Loomis, “Modern Witch Hunts” is now available on the Bookshelf of case materials on this website.

Sept. 23, 2016

“We Believe the Children” offers a clear explanation of how a then-novel crusade for child welfare and a murk of neo-Freudian psychological theory together drove officials to find suppressed trauma where none existed, and [Richard] Beck also cites the popular nonfiction books Sybil (1973) and Michelle Remembers (1980) for their role in spreading acceptance of Multiple Personality Disorder and Satanic Ritual Abuse as authentic phenomena.

“He further argues that the day care scandals represented a conservative backlash on behalf of traditional family structures, in which fathers worked while mothers stayed at home to raise children, over the newer model of two busy parents dropping their kids off with professionals.  In this reading, the contemporaneous wave of incest survivor memoirs and self-publicizing MPD victims likewise reinforced the traditionalist ideal of helpless females unable to cope in a modern society that gave women too much sexual and career freedom.

“Maybe.  Yet Beck only devotes a paragraph or two to the burgeoning pop-culture fascination with the occult which preceded the Satanic panic, and it’s worth pointing out that, despite hit films like The Godfather and Scarface, no one in the 1980s was accused of recruiting children into a mobster underworld, and despite turmoil in the Middle East, day cares were not suspected of being fronts for Islamic terrorists.

“Rather, the emphasis on perversion, ritual killing, and cultism which characterized the scare drew on obvious sources in the mass entertainment of the mid-1960s onward.  As I’ve written in my book Here’s To My Sweet Satan:  How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies, and Pop Culture, 1966-1980,

For a culture accustomed to the bloody rampages of Charles Manson, the shameless perversities of Anton LaVey, and the no-holds-barred gross-outs of The Exorcist, such combinations of cruelty, vulgarity, and the occult [in the McMartin charges] were no longer surprising.…For a long time the public had been bombarded with messages of what Satan and Satanists were like, of the words, images, and symbols associated with devil worship, and especially of how children were Satan’s favorite victims.  It had all finally proved too much for some people.

“I believe it’s this influence that fostered the climate for McMartin and other travesties, at least as much as any right-wing fantasies about dutiful moms and dangerous outsiders….”

– From “Children of the Grave” by Canaadian author and blogger George Case (Sept. 23)

An earlier challenge to Beck’s emphasis on conservative backlash points a finger at feminism.

June 4, 2015

“Gov. Pat McCrory on Thursday pardoned two half-brothers who were exonerated of murder after spending three decades in prison.

“The governor took nine months to make the decision….”

– From “Governor pardons McCollum, Brown” by Craig Jarvis in the Raleigh News & Observer  (June 4)

Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, both intellectually disabled and now destitute, had been declared innocent last year by a Superior Court judge. But that exoneration, based on DNA evidence from the crime scene, wasn’t good enough for the governor, and even now the statement accompanying his pardon of innocence is lukewarm at best:

“It is difficult for anyone to know for certain what happened the night of Sabrina Buie’s murder…. I know there are differing opinions about this case and who is responsible….”

McCollum and Brown now qualify for $50,000 for each year they were imprisoned, up to a maximum of $750,000 – unless McCrory decides that process demands further investigation as well.

Read more here.

Jan. 7, 2013

““When I began this journey almost five years ago, I was a very strong, very optimistic, very believing and very innocent person. As I stand here today, I have become very tired, very disillusioned, very unbelieving but very much the innocent woman I was.

“When I lost my home, my job and business, my worldly possessions – then my husband and friend – I realized that what I had believed in and held onto as truth and justice no longer existed. But with the love and concern and total support of my family, my attorneys and very dear friends, I have come to realize that although prison is some place I do not want to return to, there are many worse prisons to endure out in the free world.

“I can now, for the first time in five years, look my precious daughter in the eyes and tell her that this will all be over soon and that (the) life that we have dreamed about but never dared to believe in is going to come true.

“No one in this courtroom can truly understand why I chose this pathway at this time – but I am at peace with the only true person that matters.”

– From Betsy Kelly’s statement to the court (Jan. 21, 1994), as she entered a no contest plea to 30 counts of child molestation