Exonerate the Edenton Seven of child sex abuse charges

 The criminal case that I cut my professional teeth on as a journalist turned out to be one of the biggest miscarriages of justice I’ve ever seen and it’s an egregious wrong in need of righting.

I was two years out of college working for my first daily newspaper in northeastern North Carolina. I was young, naïve, and had no training in covering cops and courts. I was assigned a two-county beat, which included the town of Edenton. My new boss told me that there was a guy there arrested for abusing some children at a daycare center and I might want to keep my eye on the case.

I didn’t have to do much to keep my eye on it because it blew up in my face. The Little Rascals Day Care child sex abuse case became national news in the early 1990s. It involved seven defendants being charged with more than 400 counts of sexually abusing dozens of children under the age of 5 left in their care at the center and elsewhere.

The defendants — collectively known as the Edenton Seven — spent years in jail awaiting trial. They include the center’s co-owners Robert “Bob” Kelly and Elizabeth “Betsy” Kelly, workers Kathryn Dawn Wilson, Shelley Alyce Stone and Robin Boles Byrum, and community members Willard Scott Privott and Darlene Harris Bunch.

I spent two years covering all of the arrests, court hearings, and other pre-trial wranglings until I was promoted to news editor and taken off the case. That was at the same time the first defendant, Bob Kelly, was going to trial. A change of venue moved the case to another county that was too far away for our tiny paper to staff it, so we relied on coverage from The Associated Press.

Those two years of pre-trial coverage were wildly bizarre. The larger the case grew the more swept up the community became in what can best be described as mass hysteria. It’s fair to compare it to the Salem witch trials of 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. I couldn’t go anywhere in Edenton without there being some mention of the case. It was a very electrified atmosphere, not unlike what we are experiencing now with national politics.

The case was based on the testimony of preschoolers — testimony we now know to have been coerced and manipulated by improperly trained police detectives and therapists. At the time, however, the prevailing mantra was “believe the children.”

The biggest hurdles I faced in covering the case beyond my own naiveté was the secrecy kept by both sides. Prosecutors played their cards close to the vest and defense attorneys barred media access to their clients — at least until late in the game when the TV cameras moved in. I was working on the assumption that prosecutors had mountains of evidence and that the children had voluntarily disclosed abuse. They hadn’t. The case started when Bob Kelly slapped an unruly child and the vindictive mother pressed charges.

I wanted to believe the children, but the outrageous things they were reportedly saying and the absurd fact that abuse on that scale could be happening without anyone seeing anything or noticing any unusual behaviors kept me vacillating between both sides of the case. Eventually some of the defendants began to bond out of jail. When Robin Byrum bonded out, I got to do a telephone interview with her. After speaking with her and interviewing her mother, my opinions swayed toward the defendants.

Robin was a newlywed 19-year-old with a newborn baby when she was arrested. Because she chose to stay in jail and spend the first year of her marriage and the first year of her baby’s life behind bars rather than turn state’s evidence against the others told me that she was a person of profound character and that she was telling the truth. None of the allegations were true. I was solidly convinced of that when the state rested its case against Bob Kelly without presenting any physical evidence, eyewitnesses or any conclusive proof of abuse.

Astonishingly, a jury convicted Kelly of 99 counts of sexually molesting 12 children and sentenced him to 12 consecutive life sentences. Dawn Wilson, the cook at Little Rascals, was tried next and convicted of seven counts of sexual abuse and sentenced to life in prison. Betsy Kelly pleaded no contest to avoid trial, as did video store owner Scott Privott, who was charged with taking indecent liberties with a minor.

The state supreme court overturned the convictions of Kelly and Wilson in 1995. All charges were dismissed in 1997. The other three never got their day in court. All seven, however, have spent the last 35 years with this hanging over their heads.

So why bring this up now? I recently finished reading a new book about the case called “Twenty-One Boxes,” by Betsy Hester and co-authored by Robin Byrum (now Couto). The title refers to the 21 boxes of case transcripts and evidence now housed at the law library at Duke University. The book brought back a flood of memories and nightmares. It answered questions that plagued me for decades.

The book shed light on the real abuse in the case — the abuse the prosecutors inflicted on the children via the coercion used to elicit the responses they wanted, along with the abuse of the defendants to try and get them to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. The book, coupled with a website about the case by retired newspaperman Lew Powell, make a very compelling case for complete exoneration of the Edenton Seven and for the state to issue a public apology to them.

As one who lived on the periphery of the case and knew a lot of the people involved, I must throw my voice behind the effort to finally and forever clear the names of the true victims of the Little Rascals Day Care case. It’s time to exonerate the Edenton Seven!