In Historical Marker Fight, Edenton Revisits a Painful Era

For years, Lew Powell has wanted the state to force a reckoning and install a historic marker near the former Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton. 

That’s the spot that in 1989 launched a spate of child abuse accusations and prosecutions of seven people who came to be known as the Edenton Seven. The case grabbed headlines in national publications such as the New York Times and Elle magazine. Powell and others who support the Edenton Seven compare their prosecutions to the famed Salem witch hunt hysteria in the late 17th century. 

Little Rascals prosecutions resulted in two criminal trials, with one the most expensive ever staged at that point in North Carolina history. Many believe the episode was among the last in a cluster of unfounded child abuse cases at day care centers that swept the country in the 1980s and ’90s.

In May, Powell, a retired Charlotte Observer journalist, appeared to have won. The N.C. Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee approved his request for a plaque acknowledging a dark moment in the town and state’s history. It was expected to read: 

MORAL PANIC
Allegations of abuse at
Little Rascals Day Care,
2 blocks S., in 1989
led to a trial. Two
convictions overturned
on appeal in 1995.

The words would be visible on a silver-and-black cast aluminum sign held aloft on a pole, like the 1,685 others on roadsides across the state. It would stand two blocks from the building that hosted the former day care center. 

But opposition swelled. Someone in a local state legislator’s office who got word of the endorsement called quickly to voice his disapproval. Town officials and residents pushed back, too. 

The proposed marker would harm the town’s residents by bringing up a painful period and could retraumatize the now-adult victims of the alleged sexual abuse, they wrote to the N.C. Department of Natural & Cultural Resources. 

Pamela Cashwell, the department’s secretary, sent the proposal back to the advisory committee for reconsideration. Members will meet on December 15 to approve or reject. 

Powell is angry. He has been consumed by the case ever since he learned about it from the three-part PBS Frontline documentary series, Innocence Lost, which raised questions about the prosecution’s case and the reliability of the abuse allegations. 

It got under his skin so much that he wrote opinion pieces about it and created a website devoted to the topic. It prompted him to advocate for Andrew “Junior” Chandler, whose criminal case shares features with the Little Rascals case. 

Powell believes some in Edenton are trying to bury the history of what he and many more people consider a miscarriage of justice, and that state officials may cave in. 

“Decades later, Edenton’s moral panic deniers remain an ironclad cult,” he wrote in an October 16 Facebook post. “I understand their resistance. What epic courage it would take for a Little Rascals parent—or a now middle-aged ‘child witness’—to break ranks and acknowledge their role in ostracizing and prosecuting the Edenton Seven.” 

But those who disagree see it much differently.

Susan S. Small wrote Cashwell’s agency, saying the media unfairly portrayed her and other parents who said their children were abused as “nothing more than a hysterical ‘rage mob.’” 

“Because we chose privacy for our children, instead of running to the media to disclose the sordid details of what occurred, the media and advocates for the perpetrators had free rein to spew hearsay and advance the agenda they thought would bring attention and fame,” wrote Small, who claimed her two children were abused and helped form Citizens Against Child Abuse with other Edenton parents. 

Once again in Edenton, people who care about the truth are divided about the facts.

It Started With a Slap

The origin of what turned into criminal cases against seven people, five of whom worked at Little Rascals, began on September 29, 1988, according to court documents and news articles. 

That’s when Little Rascals co-owner Robert Kelly Jr. struck 4-year-old Joel Mabry, which a lawyer defending Kelly said was an accident in one of many court filings.

His mother, Jane Mabry, pulled the boy out of the day care. Things escalated when Audrey Stever, an Edenton dance studio owner, said that her 3-year-old son asked if he had to go to the day care and started making graphic sexual comments. 

Stever started talking to other parents, who began interrogating their children about the day care. Many sent their children to therapists who asked whether they had been sexually abused. 

Brenda Toppin, an Edenton Police Department officer, had attended a conference in Kill Devil Hills focused on child sexual abuse the previous year. Stever notified Toppin, who was a friend, and asked her if Satanic worship might be occurring at the day care. In January 1989, the Chowan County Department of Social Services opened an inquiry. 

As many as 90 children, mostly between the ages of 2 and 5 and had attended the day care, ultimately made sexual abuse allegations, including that they were forced to have sex with each other, according to news articles and court documents. They made some other dramatic claims. Children were taken on trips in hot-air balloons and spaceships, they said, and saw other children put into microwave ovens, hung from trees, and thrown into shark-infested waters. 

There was little physical evidence to substantiate the sexual abuse allegations, and no adults came forward to say they saw the alleged crimes, according to news articles and court documents. Still, Kelly was arrested and charged with 100 counts of child sexual abuse. By 1990, six more people were charged—Betsy Kelly, Robert Kelly’s then wife; Shelley Stone, Robin Byrum, Scott Privott, Darlene Harris, and Dawn Wilson. All but two—Privott and Harris—worked at the day care center. 

In time, the Edenton Seven faced 429 counts of child sexual abuse. Many spent several years in jail before getting the chance to defend themselves in court because of bonds set between $75,000 and $1.5 million. Prosecutors and defense attorneys fought over whether to try all seven together or separately. 

Robert Kelly was convicted in 1991 of 99 counts of child sexual abuse in the longest and most expensive trial in state history at the time. Dawn Wilson, the day care cook, was convicted in January 1993 after a separate trial. Kelly was given 12 consecutive life sentences; Wilson got one life sentence. 

The state Court of Appeals overturned the convictions in 1995, and prosecutors eventually dropped all charges against them and against Stone, Harris, and Byrum. Privott and Betsy Kelly maintained their innocence but pleaded no contest. 

Thirty-seven years later, many still struggle with the trauma. 

Still Living With the Legacy

Robert Kelly, now 78, spent six years behind bars. He is agnostic about the marker, he said. He doesn’t believe it will change anything important to him. 

“I think it means a lot to Lew Powell and others who have supported me,” Kelly told The Assembly. But he doesn’t care. “No historical marker or amount of money will change what happened.” 

Since married, Dawn Wilson is now Dawn Johnson. She said she wants the historical marker because the state of North Carolina needs to acknowledge “that seven people were done wrong.”

“It was the worst thing in our lives,” said Johnson, who now lives in Greensboro but visits Edenton to see friends. “It’s a sweet town, but every town has its wicked side.” 

Robin Byrum, now Robin Couto, was the youngest of the Edenton Seven. She was 19 when charged with 23 counts of child sexual abuse and had just given birth to her first child. She spent a year in jail, unable to raise a $500,000 bond. 

In 1990 she was finally released, but prosecutors didn’t drop all charges against her for six years. In 2024, she and writer Betsy Hester, a retired English teacher who followed the case from nearby Washington, N.C., published Twenty-One Boxes: Robin’s Story and the Tragedy of the Edenton Seven about the case and Robin’s experience. Couto wants people to know the real history, she said. 

“This is not about me,” she said. “This is about the fact that the hysteria did happen. The lies and the rumors happened, and the elite in Edenton wants us to be quiet about it.”

People across the state and locally should know that many people’s lives were destroyed, Couto said.

“I just want people to stop and pause and know this happened and say: ‘Hey, we can’t let this happen again,’” she said. 

Competing Views of Dreadful Accusations

Nestled near the shores of Albemarle Sound in northeastern North Carolina, Edenton is steeped in history. It was the state’s first colonial capital. 

It sits in Chowan County, which has 21 historical markers. One notes that Chowan is home to North Carolina’s oldest courthouse, built in 1767. Another honors Edenton native Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive enslaved Black woman who became an abolitionist and wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 

Not all markers are celebratory, which is the case statewide. One acknowledges the 1830 N.C. Supreme Court case, State v. Mann, which found that an Edenton white man was justified in whipping and then shooting an enslaved Black woman he had hired. The case gave enslavers almost unlimited power to use physical force against enslaved Black people.

Promoted as the state’s prettiest town, Edenton these days works to put its best foot forward as a tourist destination with a large historic district teeming with centuries-old architecture. 

The Little Rascals child abuse case is not something some locals want to resurrect.

The day after the advisory committee endorsed the proposed marker, a staff member of Republican state Rep. Edward Goodwin, an Edenton native, called the Department of Natural & Cultural Resources, saying he opposed it. Mayor W. Hackney High Jr. and Town Manager Corey Gooden were against it, too, the caller said, according to an email Deputy Secretary Deans Eatman sent to DNCR Secretary Cashwell. 

In time, town officials and residents, some of them parents of alleged child abuse victims, wrote 14 letters to the agency to explain why. 

Marjorie Hollowell, who had supported Robert Kelly when the allegations first emerged but later turned against him after her son went to therapy and she became convinced that her son had been abused, wrote that a marker would harm her family. 

“The erection of this marker would create a permanent reminder of one of the most painful periods in our family’s life,” she wrote. “Every time our son or members of our family pass it, we will be forced to confront that experience.” 

Small, who frequently spoke to the media about the case in the 1990s, wrote in her letter that she took her three children to three different counselors, including out of state, all while working a full-time job and contending with news coverage that she saw as biased. 

“No one would put themselves through such agony if the events reported by the children, separately and to numerous different, independent counselors, weren’t true,” she wrote. 

Mayor High’s letter said the marker violated the state’s standards requiring that such plaques be reserved for “subjects of statewide historical significance.” 

He also argued that the Little Rascals chapter is too complicated to be distilled into the few words able to fit on a roadside marker. “The case involved children and families, criminal prosecutions, convictions, appellate reversals, national publicity, and sharply differing experiences among those directly affected,” he wrote. “More than three decades later, these events remain deeply personal to members of our community.” 

State Rep. Goodwin, whose office called the cultural resources agency, was more blunt when The Assembly caught him by phone. 

“It’s an old thing, and they need to stop talking about it,” he said before hanging up abruptly.

Long Road to a Marker

The first time Powell requested a historical marker in 2014, the advisory committee said no. One member suggested Powell wait 25 years after all the Edenton Seven had died. He waited nine. 

When the committee voted to recommend approving the historical marker, Powell was elated, calling it a “glorious moment” in a May 13 Facebook post. “Yes, tears were shed,” he wrote. 

Some four months later, he lamented how long it was taking for Cashwell to give her final stamp of approval. In September, he posted Cashwell’s picture and complained that the secretary typically needs “no more than six weeks to approve recommendations from the Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee.” 

Leslie Cruickshank, administrator for the N.C. Highway Historical Marker Program, said it isn’t unusual for it to take more than six weeks for Cashwell to review and approve a recommended marker. 

Typically, after Cashwell gives final approval, a town or city where the plaque would be placed is notified and given 30 days to appeal. But after learning of local opposition, Cashwell sent the matter back to the advisory committee to consider opponents’ concerns, Cruickshank said.

Other campaigns to erect markers documenting painful events have stalled. It took 21 years to land one for the deadly Loray Mill strike of 1929 in Gastonia, according to a News & Observer article. The first effort in 1986 failed after city officials wanted no deaths mentioned and to include a reference to residents defeating Communist interference with Southern textile manufacturing, the paper reported. 

Gastonia officials later asked the state to reopen the application proposal, and a historical marker was installed in 2007. 

One advisory committee member, Davidson College history professor Rose Stremlau, said she voted for the Edenton marker because it was eligible under state rules and it documented notable events in North Carolina now seen as “part of a large moral panic and pattern of accusations of Satanism driving criminal behavior.”

Stremlau said she understands and has compassion for how uncomfortable people may be talking about any aspect of child sexual abuse. But a historical marker is meant to be educational. 

If it goes up, Mike Ervin will be in a prime position to see it. He and his wife live in the building that used to be the Little Rascals Day Care Center, which closed soon after allegations started in 1989. 

Several businesses operated out of the building over the years, including a hair salon. But in 2017, Ervin, former executive director of the Edenton Historical Commission, and his wife bought the property. They have now made it their home. 

Ervin lived in Edenton when the accusations about the day care center began flying around. 

It was hard for him to accept that so many people believed it, he said. He had young children at the time and couldn’t imagine them not telling him if they’d gone on a hot-air balloon ride or been to the ocean. 

He understands how painful the history is. Still, he said, people should be aware of that history. 

“This was, I think, a travesty of justice.”