Remembering the shame of the Little Rascals Day Care case

Aside from posting on the Miscellany, your Charlotte correspondent has been busy launching into the blogosphere  littlerascalsdaycarecase.org.

The tragic injustice of the Little Rascals Day Care case — which produced the longest, costliest trial in North Carolina history — has galled me for more than two decades. This blog is my modest attempt to keep alive the memory of the Edenton Seven’s assault by hysterical parents, biased therapists and shameless prosecutors.  When charges were finally dropped, the defendants deserved an apology and a statement of innocence — what they got was a gratuitous kick to the curb.

For more information, you now know where to look.

 

10 thoughts on “Remembering the shame of the Little Rascals Day Care case”

  1. Mr. Powell,

    I’m a historian and writer living in Yorktown, VA, who followed the Little Rascals case closely in the Norfolk and other papers at the time. Moved by the strangeness and patent senselessness of the Edenton event as well as by reports nationwide at the time of what came to be tagged false memory syndrome, I wrote and later published a short story inspired by the spectacular miscarriage of justice of the Little Rascals trials. The thrust of my story was popular hysteria and jaundiced ambitious therapists together with a grievous breakdown of the judicial system. You might be interested in “Witches of Devon,” which appears in my short story collection of the same title, published in 2002 (see google or Amazon.com. A few libraries hold the book (see worldcat.com).
    Sincerely, John L. Romjue (Nickell John Romjue)

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  2. Thanks so much, Mr. Romjue — I look forward to reading “Witches of Devon.”
    Coincidentally, I’ve only recently discovered two nonfiction accounts of the Little Rascals case:
    “Crimes Against Children: A Guide to Child Protection
    for Parents and Professionals featuring the Little Rascals Day
    Care Sex Scandal” (1995) by David E. McCall, a former Edenton child abuse investigator
    http://littlerascalsdaycarecase.org/Archive/13Q2/130513McCall.htm
    and
    “Magical Child Molestation Trials: Edenton’s Children Accuse” (1993) by Margaret Leong, a Chapel Hill poet who worked with preschool children
    http://littlerascalsdaycarecase.org/Archive/13Q2/130614Leong.htm
    Their views of the case could not be more at odds.

    Reply

  3. Mr. Powell,

    In establishing the archive documenting this awful travesty of justice and its continuing fallout, you have done a valuable and very good thing. And it is reassuring that Ofra Bickel has been honored for the honesty and power of her reporting. Dorothy Rabinowicz merits great credit too in her investigations of the similar case in Massachusetts.

    I believe that behind the recovered memory and child abuse therapeutic notions of that time, so destructive of the lives of the Edenton 7 and many others, lies Freud’s almost immeasurable popular impact on our now so heavily sexualized culture–though the easy lure of the witch hunt seems to have been all too contagious in Edenton’s fearful, credulous and manipulable parents as well.

    All the best to you,

    John Romjue

    Reply

  4. Thank you so much for your wonderful site on this case, and especially for uploading all the videos dealing with it. Truly a wealth of information that can’t be found anywhere else on the Internet.

    It’s amazing how Americans tend to forget this nation-wide ‘moral panic’ of the 1980s-1990s, even though so many communities were caught up in it, and so many innocent people had their lives destroyed.

    Thanks again.

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  6. The hope is that this ‘trial’ shall be remembered forever along with the Scopes trial as an egregious injustice facilitated by BOTH the prosecutors AND both of the presiding judges.

    I shudder to think how many innocents were found guilty and executed in the name of the law and by unconscious prosecutors eager to make a name for themselves – as the prosecutor in the trial of Bob Kelly. She ought to be disbarred, as the judge who continuously overruled the defense’s objection to the prosecutor ‘leading questions’ to the children on the witness stand.

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  7. The witch hunts of Edentown, North Carolina.
    This is a true horror story, one that left true victims in it’s path. The victims were the children of parents who, for whatever reason, decided to sacrifice their own children and put them through bringing false charges against so many innocent people. The victims also included those who were charged, some even convicted, and had their lives forever destroyed.
    I hope one day justice will find these parents, and those in law enforcement and the district attorneys office, who left so many lives destroyed, although I doubt that real justice will happen in this life. Someday they will all have to answer for their actions while on this earth. I wonder how they will than defend themselves. I don’t believe they will be able too.
    I have never heard of a more unsettling case than the one of The Little Rascals Daycare. The District Attorneys office and the police involved only made a mockery of our justice system, and put good, honest people through absolute hell.
    I’d love to be a fly on the wall when Jane Mabry is judged. I hope Betsy is allowed to push the “down” button on that elevator when she is sent to hell.

    Reply

  8. Lew,

    Thank you so much for creating this website and helping to keep this tragic witch trial in the public eye. It disturbs me as an American citizen that no one has published a book on this case and that the parents who fueled the hysteria have never been made to publicly apologize to the Edenton 7. I’d love to see Michael Moore do a documentary, complete with scenes of him shoving a microphone into the faces of people like Chris Bean and Jane Mabry and asking them to explain themselves.

    Sincerely,
    Diane Stranz
    Arlington, Texas

    Reply

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