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….
All molesters, please gather now on E. Eden Street
June 15, 2012
“How did such a large group of child molesters assemble? This is not New York, this is Edenton, North Carolina.”
– Edward B. Simmons, making his closing argument on behalf of Dawn Wilson (Jan. 14, 1993)
Edenton Seven can’t wait forever for exoneration
Sept. 1, 2014
The recent deaths of Little Rascals figures Patricia Kephart Hart (obituary cached here) and C. Harvey Williams remind me that the clock is ticking on the defendants as well. (Patricia Kephart, mother of one of the potential child-witnesses, dated and later married Assistant Attorney General Bill Hart; Williams was Edenton police chief.)
Others who have since died include Kirk Osborn, appellate lawyer for Dawn Wilson, and Bradford Tillery, the judge originally assigned to the case.
Let’s hope that none of the Edenton Seven, still awaiting exoneration from the state, shares the fate of Connie Tindall of the Wilmington 10.
Nancy Lamb rejected reason in favor of fantasy
July 3, 2013
“(Nancy Lamb) is aware of the naysayers, those who say she ran a witch hunt, gleaning hundreds of charges against (Bob) Kelly and his staff from the children’s accounts, which included trips aboard spaceships.
“ ‘You have to look at the big picture,’ she said. ‘You have to know that there are fantastic elements in children’s accounts of abuse, while they also say things that are quite believable.’ ”
“And believe she did….”
– From “How hard it is to say, ‘Enough’ ” by columnist Nicole Brodeur in the News & Observer (May 28, 1997)
What self-serving speciousness. Could there be a better example of failing “to look at the big picture” than Lamb’s focusing on only those fragments of the children’s manipulated testimony that supported her case?
Could N&O have thwarted ‘prosecutor gone wild’?
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)