Day-Care Center Operator Gets 7-Year Prison Term in Abuse Case

The woman who helped run the Little Rascals Day Care Center pleaded no contest Friday to 30 felony charges in a child-abuse case and was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Prosecutors dropped 18 other charges that could have sent Elizabeth Kelly to prison for life.

Her pleas were mostly to charges of taking indecent liberties with children. She also pleaded no contest to one charge of a crime against nature, one charge of being an accessory after the fact to rape, and one charge of being an accessory after the fact to a sex offense.

Kelly and her husband, Robert F. Kelly Jr., operated the child-care center in Edenton. It closed soon after her arrest in April, 1989. Elizabeth Kelly and five others were charged later.

She will get credit for the two years she served in jail before she was released on bond in 1991.

“I’m very much the innocent woman I was,” she said Friday. “Although prison is someplace I don’t want to return to, there are many worse prisons out here in the free world.”

She entered her pleas during a hearing in which her lawyer asked that charges be dismissed because she had been awaiting trial for five years.

Her husband was sentenced to 12 life terms in 1992 after his conviction on charges that he sexually abused a dozen children. He is seeking a new trial.

Day-care center cook Dawn Wilson was convicted of sexual abuse last year and sentenced to life in prison. She is appealing the verdict.

Four other defendants face trials in the case.